THE LAND OF 
ENCHANTMENT 



LIUAN 
WHITING 



THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 




PICTURESQUE BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, GRAND CANON, ARIZONA 



THE LAND OF 

ENCHANTMENT 

From Pike's Peak to the Pacific 
By LILIAN WHITING 

Author of " The World Beautiful," " The Florence of 
Landor," " Boston Days," etc. 



" The Fairest enchants me ; 
The Mighty commands me? 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 



BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1906 



Fist 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 15 1906 

Copyright Entry 
<^ir. / $~ J 9cL 
CLASS A^ XXc, No. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1906, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



-4K r*^s reserved. 
Published November, 1906. 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, V. S. A. 



S\ 



v 



A? 



^ 



TO 

The Unfading Memory 

or 

MAJOR JOHN WESLEY POWELL 

THE GREAT EXPLORER 

"Whose name is inseparably Jinked for all time with the "Titan of Chasms," 
the entire length of which he penetrated, revealing its weird and mysterious 
grandeur ; whose fidelity to scientific survey has signally advanced the progress 
of our country; whose wise foresight in advocating water supplies for arid 
lands, whose heroism amid hardships and whose persistence of energy and 
noble purpose forever endear his name to every American and to all who revere 
the loftiest achievements of science, 

These pages are inscribed by 

LILIAN WHITING. 



" The sun set, but not his hope ; 
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up." 



" What 's life to me ? 

Where'er I look is fire, where'er I listen 
Music ; and where I tend bliss evermore." 

Browning. 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

It is a special pleasure to the author to gratefully pre- 
sent her acknowledgments to Mr. W. H. Simpson, of the 
Santa Fe; Mr. S. K. Hooper, of the Denver and Rio 
Grande ; Mr. David Cameron Mac Watters, of the Short 
Line, and Mr. Croycroft, the artist of Santa Fe, New 
Mexico, for their kind courtesies in facilitating the choice 
of subjects for illustration and for their sympathetic en- 
couragement in the effort to interpret something of the 
sublimity and the loveliness of this land of enchantment 
between Pike's Peak and the Pacific. 

The Brunswick 

Boston, October, 1906 



CONTENTS 



Chapter Page 

I. With Western Stars and Sunsets ... 3 

II. Denver the Beautiful . . . . . . . 15 

III. The Picturesque Region of Pike's Peak . 51 

IV. Summer Wanderings in Colorado ... 94 
V. The Colorado Pioneers 157 

VI. The Surprises of New Mexico .... 182 

VII. The Story of Santa Fe 207 

VIII. Magic and Mystery of Arizona .... 228 

IX. The Petrified Forest and the Meteorite 

Mountain 270 

X. Los Angeles, the Spell-Binder .... 298 

XI. Grand Canon; the Carnival of the Gods 311 

Index 339 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Picturesque Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canon, Arizona Frontispiece 

Page 

Acoma, New Mexico. Two Miles Distant ........ 13 

Summit of Pike's Peak, Colorado 55 

Williams Canon, near Manitou, Colorado 64 

Seven Falls, Cheyenne Canon, near Colorado Springs, Colorado 66 

St. Peter's Dome, on the Cripple Creek Short Line . . . » » 71 

Approaching Duffield 72 s 

Portland and Independence Mines, Victor, Colorado .... 75 . 

View from Bull Hill, Richest Gulch in the World 76 - 

The Devil's Slide, Cripple Creek Short Line 80 

Colorado Springs and Tunnel No. 6, Cripple Creek Short Line . 83 

Gateway of the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, Colorado 92 

Cathedral Spires, Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, 

Colorado 92 

The Walls of the Cafion, Grand River 99 

The " Fairy Caves," Colorado 101 

Marshall Pass and ML Ouray, Colorado 103 

The Wonderful Hanging Lake, near Glen wood Springs, Colorado 112 

Cathedral Rocks, Clyde Park, Cripple Creek Short Line ... 137 

Sultan Mountain 150 

Acoma, New Mexico 183 

The Enchanted Mesa, New Mexico 184 < 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

Laguna, New Mexico 186 

Cliff Dweller Ruins, near Santa Fe, New Mexico 191 

Stone Tent. Cliff Dwellers, New Mexico 191 

San Miguel Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico . 211 

"Watch Tower." Cliff Dwellers, New Mexico . . . . . . 215 

Cliff Dwellers. Within Twenty-five Miles of Santa Fe, New 

Mexico 215 

Petrified Giants, Third Forest, Arizona 228 

Collection of Cacti made by Officers at Fort McDowell, Arizona, 

for this Picture 232 / 

Looking through a Part of the River Gorge, Foot of Bad Trail, 

Grand Canon 240 

Suwara (Giant Cactus), Salt River Valley, Arizona 267 

San Francisco Peak, near Flagstaff, Arizona 276 

Grand Canon, from Grand View Point 316 

Zigzag, Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canon 318 

A Cliff on Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canon 320 ' 






THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 



THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

CHAPTER I 

WITH WESTERN STARS AND SUNSETS 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ? " 

Tennyson 

" It may be that the gulfs will wash us down.'''' 

Tennyson 

•' My father's kingdom is so large that people perish with cold at one 
extremity whilst they are suffocated with heat at the other. " 

Cyrus to Xenophon 

The good American of the Twentieth century by no 
means defers going to Paris until he dies, but antici- 
pates the joys of Paradise by making a familiarity with 
the French capital one of the consolations that tend to 
the alleviation of his enforced terrestrial sojourn. All 
Europe, indeed, has become the pleasure-ground of Amer- 
ican tourists, a large proportion of whom fail to realize 
that in our own country there are enchanted regions 
in which the traveller feels that he has been caught 
up in the starry immensities and heard the words not 
lawful for man to utter. Within the limits of Colorado, 
New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California there are 



4 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

four centres of sublime and unparalleled scenic sublimity 
which stand alone and unrivalled in the world. Neither 
the Alps nor the Himalayas can offer any parallel to the phe- 
nomena of the mountain and desert systems of the South- 
west as wrought by the march of ages, presenting unique 
and incomparable problems of scientific interest that defy 
solution, and which are inviting the constant study and 
increasing research of many among the most eminent spe- 
cialists of the day in geology and metallurgy. The Pike's 
Peak region offers to the traveller not only the ascent of the 
stupendous Peak, but also the " Short Line " trip between 
Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek, which affords forty-five 
miles of marvellous mountain and canon effects. The 
engineering problem of the ascent of St. Peter's Dome, — 
a huge mass of granite towering eleven thousand feet into 
the air, around which the steel track winds in terraces, glory 
after glory of view repeating itself from the ascending vistas 
as the train climbs the dizzy height, — the engineering 
problem that is here at once presented and solved, has 
attracted scientific attention all over the world as the most 
extraordinary achievement in mountain transportation. 
The Grand Canon of the Colorado in Arizona, two days' 
journey from the Pike's Peak region, the Petrified Forests 
that lie also in Arizona, seventy-five miles beyond the 
border of New Mexico, and that Buried Star near Canon 
Diablo, make up a group that travellers and scientists 
are beginning ardently to appreciate. Colorado, New 



WESTERN STARS AND SUNSETS 5 

Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California offer, all in all, 
a landscape panorama that for grandeur, charm of climate, 
and rich and varied resources is unrivalled. Imagination 
falters before the resources of this region and the induce- 
ments it offers as a locality in which to live surrounded by 
perpetual beauty. The air is all exhilaration ; the deep 
blue skies are a miracle of color by day, and a miracle 
of shining firmament by night ; the land offers its richly 
raried returns in agriculture, fruit, mining, or grazing, 
according to the specific locality ; the inhabitants repre- 
sent the best quality of American life ; the opportunities 
and advantages already offered and constantly increasing 
are greater than would at first be considered possible. 
This entire Southwest can only be accurately defined as 
the Land of Enchantment. 

" Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 
Gleams that untravell'd world," 

exclaims Tennyson's Ulysses, and the wanderer under 
Western stars that hang, like blazing clusters of radiant 
light, midway in the air, cannot but feel that all these 
new experiences open to him vistas of untold significance 
and undreamed-of inspiration. 

" It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles," 

is the haunting refrain of his thoughts when, through the 
luminous air, he gazes into the golden glory of sunsets 
whose splendor is forever impressed on his memory. 



6 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Every hour of the journey through the Southwest is 
an hour of enchantment in the intense interest of the 
scenes. One must not miss the outlook when descending 
the steep grade down Raton Mountain ; nor must he fail 
to be on the alert in passing through the strange old 
pueblos of Isleta and Acoma ; he must not miss Canon 
Diablo when crossing that wonderful chasm on the won- 
derful bridge, nor the gleam of the Lowell Observatory 
at Flagstaff on its pine-clad hill-slope, nor fail to gaze on 
the purple Franciscan peaks on which the lingering sunset 
rays recall to him the poet's line, — 

"Day in splendid purple dying." 
Like a modern Telemachus he sees " the baths of all the 
western stars. 1 '' 

Between La Junta in Colorado and Los Angeles in Cali- 
fornia there lies a journey which, in connection with its 
side trips, is unequalled, because there is only one Grand 
Canon, one Pike's Peak with its adjacent wonderland, and 
because, as a rule, elsewhere in the United States — or in 
the world, for that matter, — forests do not turn into 
stone nor stars hurl themselves into the earth with a 
force that buries them too deep for resurrection. Through 
the East and the Middle West the mountains do not, on 
general principles, attempt any competition with the clouds, 
but content themselves with the gentle altitude of a mile 
or so ; the stars stay decorously in the firmament and are 
not shooting madly about, trying fantastic Jules Verne 



WESTERN STARS AND SUNSETS 7 

experiments to determine whether or not they can shine 
better from the centre of the earth than from their natural 
place in the upper air ; the stars of the Eastern skies 
" stand pat," so to speak, and are not flying in the face 
of the universe ; so that, altogether, in these regions it 
would seem quite evident that 

" The world is built in order, 
And the atoms march in tune." 

These exceptional variations to the established order, 
however, — these wonderful peaks and canons and forests 
and gardens of gods, — all these enchanted things lie, nat- 
urally, within the Land of Enchantment, within this vast 
territorial expanse replete with many other attractions. 
From La Junta let the traveller journey into Colorado 
with its splendor of resources, and in gazing upon the 
stately, solemn impressiveness of the Snowy Range he 
cannot but feel that Nature has predestined Colorado 
for the theatre of noble life and realize the influence as 
all-pervading. Infinite possibilities open before one as 
an alluring vista, and he hears the refrain, — 

" My spirit beats her mortal bars 
As down dark tides the glory slides 
And star-like mingles with the stars." 

With the excursions offered, — grand panoramas of 
mountain views where the tourist from his lofty perch in 
the observation-car looks down on clouds and on peaks 
and pinnacles far below the heights to which his train 



8 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

climbs, — with the cogwheel road ascending Pike's Peak, 
the fascinating drives through Cheyenne Canon, the Gar- 
den of the Gods, Ute Pass, and around Glen Eyrie, and with 
the luxurious ease of life at " The Antlers," the traveller 
finds fairly a new world, rich in suggestion and wide out- 
look. This attractive region is, however, only one of the 
central points of interest in Colorado. Denver, the bril- 
liant and fascinating capital ; Pueblo, the metropolis of 
Southern Colorado ; Glen wood Springs, the romantic and 
fashionable watering place and summer resort high up in the 
mountains on the beautiful " scenic route " of the Denver 
and Rio Grande ; Boulder, the picturesque mountain town, 
with its State University so ably conducted ; Greeley, the 
town of the " Union Colony ," whose romantic and tragic 
story is a part of the great history of the Centennial 
State, and where an admirable normal school draws stu- 
dents from all over the country, even including New Eng- 
land, — these and a wealth of other features offer interest 
that is coming to engage the attention of the civilized 
world. 

New Mexico has been more or less considered as one of 
the impossible and uncivilized localities, or has failed to 
establish any claim to being considered at all ; yet here 
is a territory whose climate is simply delightful by virtue 
of its altitude, — cool in summer and mild and sunny in 
winter, — whose mines of amethysts and other precious 
stones suggest developments yet undreamed of; whose 



WESTERN STARS AND SUNSETS 9 

ethnological interest, in the marvellous remains of Cliff 
dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic 
records, enchains the scientist ; a territory whose future 
promises almost infinitely varied riches in many directions 
of its development. 

Arizona is simply a treasure land. If it offered only 
that enthralling feature, the Grand Canon, it would 
be a central point of pilgrimage for the entire civilized 
world ; but even aside from this, — the sublimest vision 
ever offered to human eye, — even aside from the Grand 
Canon, which dominates the world as the most sublime 
spectacle, — Arizona offers the fascinations of the Painted 
Desert, the Tonto Basin, the uncanny buttes that 
loom up in grotesque shapes on the horizon, the 
dreamy lines of mountain ranges, the strange pueblos, 
the productive localities where grains and where fruits 
and flowers grow with tropical luxuriance, the Pet- 
rified Forests, and the exquisite coloring of sky and 
atmosphere. 

Southern California, with its brilliantly fascinating me- 
tropolis, Los Angeles ; the neighboring city of Pasadena, 
the " Crown of the Valley " ; with an entensive electric 
trolley-car connection with towns within a radius of fifty 
miles, and other distinctive and delightful features, almost 
each one of which might well furnish a separate chapter of 
description ; with mountain trips made easy and enjoyable 
by the swift electric lines, — all this region fascinates the 



10 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

imagination and indicates new and wonderful vistas of life 
in the immediate future. The vast and varied resources 
of the great Southwest will also, as they are developed, 
increasingly affect the economic aspects of the country. 

To the traveller one fact stands out in especial promi- 
nence, and that is that the traditional primitive conditions 
in this region hardly continue to exist. The picturesque 
aspects of nature form the stage setting to very-much-up- 
to-date life. The opportunities and advantages already 
offered and constantly increasing are greater than would 
at first be considered possible. In isolated homes on the 
desert the children of the family will be found studying 
the higher mathematics, taking music lessons, or receiving 
lessons in languages (classic, or the romance languages) 
from some one in the neighborhood who is able to give 
such instruction. If any traveller expects to encounter the 
traditional " cow-boy " aspects of life, he will be very much 
disappointed. There is no refinement of life in the East 
that is not mirrored and duplicated in the West. There 
are no aspirations, no ideals, no fine culture in the East 
that have not their corresponding aspects in the great 
West. In fact, in many ways the West begins where the 
East leaves off. For instance, the new towns of the West 
that have sprung up within the past twenty years have 
never known what it was to have gas or horse-cars. 
They begin with electric lights and electric transit. Their 
schoolhouses are built with up-to-date methods, and the 



WESTERN STARS AND SUNSETS 11 

houses, however modest, are constructed with a taste and 
a beauty unknown in the rural regions of the East. The 
square white house with green blinds and a straight 
stone-paved pathway to the front gate, so common in New 
England, is not seen in the West. Instead, the most 
modest little structure has its piazza, its projecting bay 
window thrown out, its balcony — something, at all events, 
tasteful and beautiful to the eye. 

The journey from La Junta (in Colorado) to Los An- 
geles offers a series of enthralling pictorial effects that are 
invested with all the refinements of civilized life delight- 
fully devoid of its commonplaceness. These long trans- 
continental trains with two engines, one at the front and 
one at the rear, with their different grades of the Pull- 
man, the tourist, and the emigrant car service, are as dis- 
tinctive a feature of the twentieth century as the " prairie 
schooners " were of the early half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The real journey begins, of course, at Chicago, 
and as these trains leave in the evening the traveller fares 
forth in the seclusion of his berth in the Pullman. The 
nights on a sleeping-car may be a very trance of ecstasy 
to one who loves to watch the panorama of the skies. 
Raise the curtain, pile up the pillows to the angle that 
one can gaze without lifting the head, and what ethereal 
visions one is wafted through ! One has a sense of flying 
in the air among the starry spaces, especially if he chances 
to have the happy fortune of a couch on the side where 



12 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the moon is shining down, — a midsummer moon, with 
stars, and filmy, flitting clouds, — when the panorama of 
the air becomes the enchantment of a dream. 

It is, literally, " such stuff as dreams are made of," and 
when one drops off into slumber, he utilizes it for his 
fancies of the night. Miss Harriet Hosmer, the famous 
sculptor, once related a story of a night journey she took 
with a party of congenial spirits on horseback between 
Rome and Florence. By way of " a lark " they rested by 
day and rode by night, and the beauty of the effects of 
light and shade sank into her mind so that she drew 
on them thirty years or more later for the wonderful 
designs in her great " Gates, 1 '' which even rival those 
of Ghiberti. " The night hath counsel " and suggestion 
of artistic beauty as well, and the effects that one may get 
from a flying train are impossible to obtain under any 
other condition. After all, is it not a part of the fine 
art of living to take the enjoyment of the moment as it 
comes, in whatever guise, without lamenting that it is not 
something else ? 

These splendidly equipped trains of the Santa Fe ser- 
vice admit very little dust ; the swift motion keeps up a 
constant breeze, and some necromancy of perpetual vigi- 
lance surrounds the traveller with exceptional cleanliness 
and personal comfort. One experiences a certain sense of 
detachment from ordinary day and daylight duties that 
is exhilarating. 



WESTERN STARS AND SUNSETS 13 

Kansas City, the gateway to the great Southwest, 
might well claim attention as an important manufacturing 
and distributing centre ; Kansas itself, once the bed of an 
inland sea, is not without scientific interest for the deposits 
of gypsum and salt that have left the soil so fertile, as well 
as for strange fossils revealing gigantic animals, both 
land and aquatic, that have lived there, — the mas- 
todon, rhinoceros, elephant, the crocodile and shark, 
— many of whose skeletons are preserved in the Na- 
tional Museum in Washington. The prosperous inland 
cities with their schools and colleges, their beautiful 
homes and constant traffic, — all these features of Kansas, 
the state of heroic history, are deeply impressive. But 
it is Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, with which 
these pages are chiefly concerned, and the especially 
picturesque aspects of the journey begin with La 
Jnuta. 

Entering Colorado, the plateau is four thousand feet 
above sea level, and constantly rising. This altitude ren- 
ders the climate of New Mexico particularly invigorating 
and delightful. 

The most romantic and poetically enchanting regions of 
the United States are entered into on this journey, in 
which easy detours allow one to visit that mysterious 
" City in the Sky," the pueblo of Acoma, near Albuquer- 
que in New Mexico ; to make excursions to Montesuma's 
Well ; to the mysterious ruin of Casa Grande ; to the Twin 



14 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Lakes (which lie on a mountain crest ) ; and to study 
other marvels of nature in Arizona. The splendors of 
Colorado, with the myriad mountain peaks and silver lakes, 
the mysterious canons and deep gorges, the rose- 
flushed valleys lying fair under a sapphire sky in the 
luminous golden atmosphere, and the profound interest in- 
spired in the general social tone of life in its educational, 
economic, and religious aspects, invest a summer-day tour 
through the Land of Enchantment with all the glory and 
the freshness of a dream. 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 15 
CHAPTER II 

DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 

" I will make me a city of gliding and wide-way ed silence, 

With a highway of glass and of gold; 
With life of a colored peace, and a lucid leisure. 

Of smooth electrical ease, 
Of sweet excursion of noiseless and brilliant travel, 

With room in your streets for the soul. " 

Stephen Phillips 

Denver the Beautiful is the dynamo of Western civi- 
lization, and the keynote to the entire scale of life in Col- 
orado. The atmosphere seems charged with high destiny. 
" I worship with wonder the great Fortune," said Emerson, 
using the term in the universal sense, " and find it none 
too large for use. My receptivity matches its greatness." 
The receptivity of the dwellers in this splendid environ- 
ment seems to match its greatness, and expand with the 
increase of its vast resources. As Paris is France, so 
Denver is Colorado. Hardly any other commonwealth 
and its capital are in such close relation, unless it be that 
of Massachusetts and Boston. Colorado is a second Italy, 
rather than Switzerland, as it has been called. Over it 
bends the Italian sky ; its luminous atmosphere is that 
of Dante's country; at night the stars hang low as they 



16 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

hang over the heights of San Miniato in fair Florence ; 
the mountain coloring, when one has distance enough, 
has the soft melting purple and amethyst lights of the 
Apennines, and the courtesy of the people is not less 
marked than in the land of the olive and the myrtle. 
Then, too, the light — the resplendent and luminous ef- 
fect of the atmosphere — is like that of no other state. 
The East is dark by comparison with this transparency 
of golden light. 

As the metropolis of the great West between Chicago 
and the Pacific Coast, Denver has a continual procession 
of visitors from all countries, who pause in the overland 
journey to study the outlook of the most wonderful state 
in the Union, — that of the richest and most varied re- 
sources. To find within the limits of one state resources 
that include gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, coal, and tin 
mines ; agriculture, horticulture, stock raising, manufac- 
tures, and oil wells, sounds like a fiction ; yet this is lit- 
erally true. Add to these some of the most beautiful 
and sublime scenery in the world, the best modern appli- 
ances, and the most intelligent and finely aspiring class 
of people, and one has an outline of the possibilities of 
the Centennial State. 

Denver is, geographically, the central city of the country, 
equally accessible from both the Atlantic and the Pacific 
coasts, from the North and the South. It has the finest 
climate of the continent ; its winters are all sunshine and 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 17 

exhilaration, with few cloudy or stormy days ; its summer 
are those in which oppressive heat is hardly known, and 
the nights are invariably cool. It is a great railroad 
centre ; it has infinite space in which to extend itself 
in any direction ; it has unsurpassed beauty of location. 
No city west of Chicago concentrates so many desirable 
features, for all this wealth of resource and loveliness of 
scenic setting is the theatre of noble energy and high 
achievement. Denver is only twenty-six hours from 
Chicago ; it is but forty-five hours from New York. 
Although apparently a city of the plains, it is a mile 
above sea level, and is surrounded with more than two 
hundred miles of mountain ranges, whose changeful color, 
in royal purple, deep rose, amber, pale blue, gleams 
through the transparent air against the horizon. The 
business and hotel part of Denver lies on a lower level, 
while the Capitol, a superb building of Colorado marble, 
and all the best residential region, is on a higher plateau. 
The Capitol has the novel decoration of an electric flag, 
so arranged that through colored glass of red, white, and 
blue the intense light shines. 

The Denver residential region is something unusual 
within general municipal possibilities, as it has unbounded 
territory over which to expand, thus permitting each home 
to have it own grounds, nearly all of which are spacious ; 
and these, with the broad streets lined with trees, give 
to this part of the city the appearance of an enormous 



18 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

park. For miles these avenues and streets extend, all 
traversed by swift electric cars that so annihilate time and 
space that a man may live five, ten, or a dozen miles from 
his place of business and call it all joy. He insures 
himself pure air, beautiful views, and an abundance of 
ground. If the family desires to go into the city for 
evening lectures, concerts, or the theatre, the transit is 
swift and enjoyable. They control every convenience. 
These individual villas are all fire-proof. The municipal 
law requires the buildings to be of brick or stone, thus 
making Denver a practically fireproof city. Both the 
business blocks and the homes share the benefit of the 
improved modern taste in architecture. The city of 
Denver covers an area of eighty-nine square miles, and 
these limits are soon to be extended. 

The Capitol has an enchanting mountain view ; it also 
contains a fine museum of historic relics found in Colorado 
from cliff-dwellings and other points. A million dollars 
has been offered — and refused — for this state collection. 
The City Park, covering nearly four hundred acres, with 
its two lakes, its beds of flowers and groups of shrubbery ; 
its casino, where an orchestra plays every afternoon in the 
summer, while dozens of carnages and motor cars with 
their tastefully dressed occupants draw up and listen to 
the music, is a centre of attraction to both residents and 
visitors. This park is to Denver as is the Pincian Hill to 
Rome, or as Hyde Park to London, — the fashionable drive 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 19 

and rendezvous. Great beds of scarlet geraniums contrast 
with the emerald green of the grass, while here and there 
a fountain throws its spray into the air. Far away on 
the horizon are the encircling mountains in view for over 
two hundred miles, the ranges taking on all the colors of 
fairyland, while a deep turquoise sky, soft and beautiful, 
bends over the entire panorama. From this plateau four 
great peaks are in view : Pike's Peak, seventy-five miles to 
the south ; Long's, Gray's, and James's peaks, all distinctly 
silhouetted against the sky, rising from the serrated range 
which connects them. During these open-air concerts 
in the park there is a midsummer holiday air over the 
scene as if all the city were en fete. 

The architectural scheme of Denver's residential region 
harmonizes with the landscape. The houses are not the 
palaces -of upper Fifth Avenue and Riverside drive, or of 
Massachusetts or Connecticut avenues in Washington ; 
but there is hardly an individual residence that has not 
legitimate claim to beauty. The tower, the oriel win- 
dow, and the broad balcony are much in evidence ; and 
the piazza, with its swinging seat, its easy chairs, and 
table disposed on a bright rug, suggest a charm of vie in- 
time that appeals to the passer-by. Books, papers, and 
magazines are scattered over the table : the home has the 
unmistakable air of being lived in and enjoyed ; of being 
the centre of a happy, intelligent life, buoyant with enter- 
prise and energy, and identified with the social progress of 



20 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the day. On the greenest of lawn a jet of water or, in 
many cases, a fountain plays, the advantage of an irrigated 
country being that the householder creates and controls 
his own climatic conditions. The rain, — it raineth 
every day when irrigation determines the shower ; roses 
grow in riotous profusion on the lawn, and the crimson 
" rambler * climbs the portico ; lilies nod in the luminous 
gold of the sunshine, and all kinds of foliage plants lend 
their rich color to these beautiful grounds that surround 
every home. To the children growing up in Denver the 
spectacle of dreary streets would be as much of a novelty 
as the ruins of Karnak. The line that divides the past 
from the present is not only very definite, but also very 
recent, as is indicated by the question of a five-year-old 
lad who wonderingly asked : " Mamma, did they ever 
have horses draw the trolley cars ? " The mastodon is 
not more remote in antiquity to the man or woman of 
to-day than was the idea of horses drawing a car to this 
child. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth cen- 
turies the gulf of demarcation is almost as wide as between 
the fifteenth and the nineteenth. 

The streets of Denver are very broad, usually planted 
with trees, and the smooth roads offer an earthly paradise 
to the motor-car transit that abounds in Denver. One 
of the happy excursions is that of motoring to Colorado 
Springs, seventy-five miles distant, a constant entertain- 
ment. With the splendid electric-transit system, anni- 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 21 

hilating distance ; with the broad streets paved after the 
best modern methods ; with the wide and smooth side- 
walks of Colorado stone and the almost celestial charm 
of the view, city life is transformed. Telephonic service 
is practically universal ; electric lighting and an admirable 
water system are among the easy conveniences of this sec- 
tion, which is not yet suburban because of its complete 
identification with all other parts of the city. 

The universality of telephonic intercourse in Colorado 
would go far to support the theory of Dr. Edward Everett 
Hale that the time will come when writing will be a lost 
art, and will be considered, at best, as a clumsy and la- 
borious means of communication in much the same 
manner that the late centuries regard the production of 
the manuscript book before the invention of the art of 
printing. In few cities is the telephone service carried 
out to such constant colloquial use as in Denver. The 
traveller finds in his room a telephone as a matter of 
course, and there are very few quarters of an hour when 
the bell does not summon him to chat with a friend, 
from one on the same floor of the hotel to one who is 
miles away in the city, or even fifty or a hundred miles 
distant, as at Greeley, Colorado Springs, or Pueblo. 

" How are you to-day ? " questions the friendly voice. 
" Did you see so-and-so in the morning papers ? And 
what do you think about it ? and can you be ready at 
eleven to go to hear Mrs. lecture? and at one will 



22 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

you lunch with Mrs. ? the entire conversation to be 

in Italian ? and could you go at about four this afternoon 
to a tea to meet an Oriental Princess who will discuss 
the laws of reincarnation ? and will you also dine with 
us at seven, and go later to the Woman's Municipal 
Club that holds a conference to-night ? " All those lovely 
things fall upon one with apparently no thought of its 
being an unusual day — this is Denver ! This is twenti- 
eth-century life. This is an illustration of what can be 
done when the non-essential is eliminated from the days 
and that which is essential is felicitously pursued. 

When the Denver woman remarked to the Eastern 
woman sojourner within the gates that she was unable to 
be away that autumn on any extended absence, as the 
campaign was to be more than usually important, the 
wanderer from the Atlantic shore irreverently laughed. 
Her hostess endeavored (unsuccessfully) not to seem 
shocked by this levity regarding serious subjects. She re- 
membered that there were extenuating circumstances, and 
that the Eastern women had really never had a fair chance 
in life. Their part, she reflected, consisted in obeying laws 
and abiding by whatever was decreed, with no voice al- 
lowed to express their own preferences or convictions. She 
remembered that a proportion of the feminine New England 
intellect consecrates its powers and its time to extended 
researches in the Boston Public Library and in the vener- 
able records of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 23 

a perpetual quest of information regarding its ancestors, 
who are worshipped with the zeal and fervor of the 
Japanese. The Boston woman, indeed, may have only the 
most vague ideas regarding the rate bill, the problem of 
the Philippines, the Panama Canal, or the next Governor 
of Massachusetts ; but she is thoroughly conversant with 
all the details of the Mayflower and her own ancestral 
dignities. Recognizing the New England passion for its 
ancestry, a leading Boston journal offers a page, weekly, 
to open correspondence on the momentous question as to 
whether Winthrop Bellingham married Priscilla Patience 
Mather in 1699 or in 1700, and a multitude of similar 
questions concerning the vanished centuries. The Denver 
woman realized all this and was discreetly charitable in 
her judgment of her friend's failure to recognize the sig- 
nificant side of the political enfranchisement of women in 
Colorado. For despite some actual disadvantages and 
defects of woman suffrage in the centennial state, and a 
vast amount of exaggerated criticism on these defects, it is 
yet a benefit to the four states that enjoy it, — Colorado, 
Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. 

In a majority of the states of the entire nation there 
is a conviction (and one not without its claims) that 
women are adequately represented and protected in all 
their rights, as things are, and that it is superfluous to 
increase the vote. 

The anti-suffrage argument suggests many reflections 



24 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

whose truth must be admitted, and this side of the con- 
troversy is espoused and led by some proporion of men 
and women whose names inspire profound respect, if not 
conviction, with their belief. Still, the fact remains that 
when woman suffrage is subjected to the practical test of 
experience, the advantages are so obvious, its efficacy for 
good so momentous, that their realization fairly compels ac- 
ceptance. In the entire nation there has never been a man 
or a woman whose clearness and profundity of intellect, 
moral greatness, and sympathetic insight into the very 
springs of national and individual life exceeded those of Lucy 
Stone, the remarkable pioneer in the political emancipation 
of women, whose logical eloquence and winning, beautiful 
personality was the early focus of this movement. Mrs. 
Stone surrounded herself with a noble group, — Mary A. 
Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
ginson, and others whose names readily suggest them- 
selves, and with whom, in the complete companionship 
and sympathy of her husband, Dr. Henry B. Blackwell, 
she successfully worked, even though the final success has 
not yet been achieved. Other great and noble women — 
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton — consecrated 
their entire lives and remarkable powers to the early , 
championship of woman suffrage. The present ranks of 
women workers — the younger women — are so numerous, 
and they include so large a proportion of the most notable 
women of both the East and the West, that volumes would 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 25 

not afford sufficient room for adequate allusion. In Den- 
ver the leading people are fully convinced of the respon- 
sibility of women in politics. Although the ballot has 
not been generally granted to women, the very movement 
toward it has resulted in their higher education and their 
larger freedom in all ways. The situation reminds one of 
the " subtle ways n of Emerson's Brahma : 

" If the red slayer think he slays,' 
Or if the slain think he is slain, 
They know not well the subtle ways 
I keep, and pass, and turn again. 

** Far or forgot to me is near; 

Shadow and sunlight are the same ; 
The vanished gods to me appear ; 
And one to me are shame and fame. 

" They reckon ill who leave me out; 
When me they fly, I am the wings; 
I am the doubter and the doubt, 
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." 

Apparently, the principle of woman suffrage has " sub- 
tle ways " in which " to pass and turn again." It has 
recently turned in a manner to compel a new and more 
profound revision of all opinion and argument. 

Colorado presents a most interesting field for the study 
of woman suffrage, and from any fair and adequate review 
of its workings and results there could hardly fail to be 
but one conclusion, — that of its signal value and impor- 
tance as a factor in human progress. One of its special 



26 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

claims is of a nature not down on the bills, — the fact of the 
great intellectual enlargement and stimulus, — aside from 
its results, which the very exercise of political power gives 
to the women of the state. It is seen in the higher qual- 
ity of conversational tone and the tendency to eliminate 
the inconsequential and the inane because great matters 
of universal interest were thus brought home to women 
in connection with their power to decide on these mat- 
ters. This result is perhaps equally seen among the 
women who rejoice and the women who regret the fact of 
their political enfranchisement. For in Colorado, as well 
as in other states, there is a proportion of women who do 
not believe in the desirability of the ballot for themselves. 
They sincerely regret that it has been " forced,"" as they 
say, upon them. This proportion in Colorado is not 
a large one, but it includes some of the most intelli- 
gent and cultured women, just as an enthusiastic accept- 
ance of the ballot includes a much larger proportion of 
this higher order of women. However, welcome or un- 
welcome, desired or not desired, the ballot is there, and 
so the women who regret this fact yet realize its responsi- 
bility and feel it a moral duty to use it wisely as well. 
And so they, too, study great questions, and discuss them, 
and fit themselves to use the power that is conferred upon 
them. All this reacts on the general tone of society, and 
the quality of conversation at ladies 1 lunches, at teas, 
and at clubs, is of a far higher order than is often 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 27 

found in other states among the more purely feminine 
gatherings. 

Among the women who have successfully admin- 
istered public office in Colorado was the late Mrs. 
Helen Grenfell, whose record as State Superintendent 
of Public Instruction was so remarkable that both 
political parties supported her. A Denver journal said 
of her : 

"Mrs. Grenfell's term has lasted six years, the last two 
years having been under a Republican administration, al- 
though Mrs. Grenfell is a Democrat. Her most notable 
achievement has been in her conduct of the school lands of 
the state, making them valuable sources of revenue. Her 
policy from the first was against the sale of the school lands, 
which comprise some three million acres. The income from 
such sales had been limited, as the investments w r ere pre- 
scribed, and the interest rate rather low, as Western interest 
goes. The leasing system was inaugurated under Mrs. Gren- 
fell's direction, and the result was an increase of school reve- 
nues of nearly two hundred thousand dollars a year, with no 
decrease in the capital. The Land Department of the state 
shares the credit with the state superintendent of public 
instruction, as they have administered her policy wisely, but 
the policy was hers alone." 

Judge Lindsay of Denver, giving an official opinion as 
to the desirability of woman suffrage for Colorado, said : 



28 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

"Woman suffrage in Colorado for over ten years has more 
than demonstrated its justice. No one would dare to propose 
its repeal ; and, if left to the men of the state, any proposi- 
tion to revoke the right bestowed upon women would be 
overwhelmingly defeated. 

" Many good laws have been obtained in Colorado which 
would not have been secured but for the power and influence 
of women. 

" At some of the elections in Denver frauds have been 
committed. Ninety-nine per cent of these frauds were com- 
mitted by men, without any connivance or assistance, direct 
or indirect, from women ; but because one per cent were 
committed by women, there are ignorant or careless-minded 
people in other states who actually argue that this is a reason 
for denying women the right to vote. If it were a just reason 
for denying suffrage to women, it would be a ten times greater 
reason for denying it to men. 

" In Colorado it has never made women any the less wo- 
manly or any the less motherly, or interfered with their 
duties in the home, that they have been given the right to 
participate in the affairs of state. 

"Many a time I have heard the 'boss' in the political 
caucus object to the nomination of some candidate because of 
his bad moral character, with the mere explanation that if the 
women found him out it might hurt the whole ticket. While 
many bad men have been nominated and elected to office in 
spite of woman suffrage, they have not been nominated and 
elected because of woman suffrage. If the women alone had 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 29 

a right to vote, it would result in a class of men in public 
office whose character for morality, honesty, and courage 
would be of a much higher order. . . . 

" People have no right to judge woman suffrage in Colorado 
by the election frauds in a few precincts. The election frauds 
in Philadelphia, where women do not vote, were never used 
as a reason why suffrage should be denied to men. . . . 

" With women, as with men, it requires more or less public 
sentiment to arouse them to their civic duties ; but when 
aroused, as they frequently are, their power for good cannot 
be overestimated. Again, the very fact that the women have 
such a power is a wonderful reserve force in the cause of 
righteousness in Colorado, and has been a powerful deterrent 
in anticipating and opposing the forces of evil. 

" It does not take any mother from her home duties or cares 
to spend ten minutes in going to the polling place and cast- 
ing her vote and returning to the bosom of her home ; but 
in that ten minutes she wields a power that is doing more to 
protect that home now, and will do more to protect it in the 
future, and to protect all other homes, than any power or 
influence in Colorado. 

" I know that the great majority of people in Colorado favor 
woman suffrage, after more than a decade of practical experi- 
ence, — first, because it is fair, just, and decent ; and secondly, 
because its influence has been good rather than evil in our 
political affairs." 

Judge Lindsay's words represent the general attitude of 
the representative people of the state. 



30 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

The Hon. Henry M. Teller, senior senator of Colorado, 
is one of the most interesting men in the Centennial State, 
and the traveller who may meet and talk with him is im- 
pressed with his quiet sincerity, with the sense of reserved 
power with which he seems endowed, and the refinement 
and directness of his methods. He is by birth an Eastern 
man, and a graduate of Harvard ; but his mature life has 
been passed in Colorado. As a lawyer his law office claims 
much of his time and thought, even with all the great 
tide of national interests with which he is identified. He 
is a thorough and, indeed, an astute politician ; not 
in the " machine " sense, but with a very clear and com- 
prehensive grasp of the situation and a large infusion 
of practical sagacity. Senator Teller is in no sense an 
enthusiast. He is responsive to high aims and high 
ideals ; he knows what they are, so to speak ; he recog- 
nizes them on sight ; he never falls into the error of under- 
valuing them ; but he is not a man to be carried away by 
an ecstatic vision, and he would have no use for wings at 
all where he had feet. He would regard the solid earth 
as a better foundation, on the whole, than the air, and one 
more suited to existing conditions. 

Senator Teller has had more than a quarter of a cen- 
tury's experience in political life and in statesmanship. 
For two years he was a member of the Cabinet. For 
twenty-seven years he has been in the Senate, where, with 
Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, he shares the highest 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 31 

honor, and the most absolute confidence, in both his flaw- 
less integrity and conspicuous ability, that the Senate, and 
the nation as well, can give to him. 

Senator Patterson, the junior senator from Colorado, is 
a man whom, if he encounters an obstacle does not grant 
it the dignity of recognition. He instantly discovers the 
end, — the desired result, — and declares, per saltum, "It 
is right ; it should be done, — it shall be done." Senator 
Patterson is a man of very keen perceptions and one with 
whom it is easy to come into touch instantly ; he is respon- 
sive, sympathetic, full of faith that the thing that ought 
to be accomplished can be accomplished, and therefore that 
it shall be. Senator Patterson has the typical American 
experience of successful men lying behind him. He was 
on familiar terms with the intricacies of a newspaper office 
in his youth ; he studied in an Indiana college without 
an annual expenditure of that twenty thousand dollars 
which some of the latter-day Harvard undergraduates find 
indispensable to the process of securing their " B. A," and 
tradition records, indeed, that the junior Colorado senator, 
in the prehistoric days of his youth, set out for the foun- 
tain of learning with a capital of forty dollars ; that he 
frugally walked from Crawfordsville to Indianapolis that 
he might not deplete his financial estate which was des- 
tined to buy a scholarship, and that in this unrecorded 
tour in the too, too truly rural region of his early life, he 
cleaned two clocks on the way in payment for lodging, and 



32 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

that he cleaned them uncommonly well. Of all this tradi- 
tionary history who shall say? Senator Patterson is a 
man who would always keep faith with his aims and con- 
victions. He is sunny and full of wit, and full of faith 
in the ultimate triumph of good things in general, and is, 
all in all, one of the most genial and delightful of men — 
and senators. 

It is related that Senator Patterson first dawned upon 
Denver in its primeval period of 1872, when its municipal 
affairs were conducted by two prominent — if not eminent 
— gentlemen, one of whom was the champion gambler, 
and the other the champion brewer of the metropolis. 
There were eleven thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight 
other citizens in this municipality besides the brewer and 
the gambler (and the population was said to have been 
twelve thousand in all), and the eleven thousand nine hun- 
dred and ninety-eight, like " The Ten " of early Floren- 
tine history, decided that would " reform the town." Their 
united effort was to elect Mr. Patterson as Mayor. And 
a good one he proved ; and he has gone on and on, in the 
minds as well as in the hearts of his fellow-citizens, until 
now he is the colleague of Senator Teller, and he offers 
another typical illustration of true American integrity 
and honorable ambition and success. Personally, Senator 
Patterson is one of the most winning men in the world, 
and one delights in his success and the high estimation 
in which he is held. 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 33 

The development of Colorado and other parts of the 
great Southwest during the past half-century has created 
a new order of employment in that of the government 
expert, — the specialist in upland or hydraulic irrigation, 
in engineering and mining problems. The government 
surveying work has also increased largely, both in extent 
and in the greater number of specialties now required. 
The Geological Survey and the Agricultural Department, 
both included under the Department of the Interior, are 
rapidly multiplying branches of work that require both the 
skilled training and ability for original research and accom- 
plishment. These positions, which command government 
salaries at from some eighteen to twenty-five hundred 
dollars a year, afford such opportunity for the expert to 
reveal his value that private corporations and business 
houses continually draw on the ranks of the government 
employees. Of late years the demand for the expert irriga- 
tion engineer has been so great in Colorado as to seriously 
embarrass the government forces by drawing some of the 
best men for private service. Denver is an especial centre 
for these enterprises, as being the natural metropolis 
for the vast inter-mountain region and the plains coun- 
try of the Missouri River. This vast territory will 
support many millions more of population. In fact, 
the dwellers within this described territory at this day 
are but pioneers on the frontier to what the future 
will develop, although they already £hjoy all the bene- 



34 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

fits of the older states, with countless advantages beside 
which they cannot enjoy. 

The smelteries in Denver, of which the Grant is the 
largest, treat millions of pounds of copper and lead, and 
great quantities of silver and gold, while there are also 
extensive ones in Pueblo, Leadville, Durango, and other 
places. There is also a good proportion of Colorado ore 
which is not treated at all at smelteries, but is of a free- 
milling order. The revenue from mining has exceeded 
fifty millions of dollars annually of late years, but the 
revenue from agriculture exceeds that of the mines, and to 
these must be added some twenty millions a year from live 
stock during the past two or three years. In the aggre- 
gate, Colorado has an internal revenue of hardly less than 
one hundred millions a year, and this largely passes through 
Denver as the distributing point, constituting the Capital 
one of the most prosperous of young cities. Denver stands 
alone in a rich region. One thousand miles from Chicago, 
six hundred miles from Kansas City, and four hundred 
miles from Salt Lake City, Denver holds its place without 
any rival. 

The ideal conditions of living have never been entirely 
combined in any one locality on this sublunary planet, so 
far as human history reveals ; and with all the scenic 
charm, the rich and varied resources, and the phenomenal 
development of Colorado, no one could truthfully describe 
it as Utopia. There is no royal road to high achievement 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 35 

in any line. Difficulties and obstacles are u a part of the 
play, v> and he alone is wise who, by his own determina- 
tion, faith, and persistence of energy, transforms his very 
obstacles into stepping-stones and thus gains the strength 
of that which he overcomes. 

Northern Colorado has great resources even beyond the 
coal fields that will make it the power centre ; with its 
prestige of Denver, and such surrounding towns as Gree- 
ley, Boulder, Fort Collins, Golden, and others, all of which 
fall within a group of social and commercial centres that 
will soon be interconnected by a network of electric trolley 
lines. For the electric road between Greeley and Denver 
Mr. J. D. Houseman has secured a right of way one hun- 
dred and fifty feet wide, the rails being midway between 
the Union Pacific and the Burlington lines. Mr. House- 
man is one of the noted financiers of the East who came 
to Denver to incorporate and build this road, and his is 
only one of three companies that are now in consultation 
with the power company negotiating for the supplies which 
will enable them to build the proposed new roads. 

The Seeman Tunnel, which is to be constructed near 
Idaho Springs, at a distance of fifty miles from Denver, 
and which is to be twelve miles in length, although at 
an elevation of eighty-five hundred feet, is yet to extend 
under Fall River and the Yankee, Alice, and the Lombard 
mining districts. It will be one of the marvels of the 
state, and will penetrate a thousand mining veins. The 



36 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Continental Mines, Power and Reduction Company, re- 
cently incorporated with a capital of three millions, of 
which Captain Seeman is the president, owns many of the 
mining veins which will be touched by this tunnel. Many 
of the veins to which this tunnel will afford approach have 
not been accessible heretofore for more than four or five 
months in the year. For the remaining six or seven 
months travel is practically impossible in these mountains ; 
the " claims " cannot be reached, as they lie in the region 
of perpetual snow. When the Seeman Tunnel is completed 
the owner of any claim that is tapped by it can, by paying 
a certain royalty per ton for each ton of ore mined, obtain 
the right to work it in the tunnel, thus being able to pro- 
ceed through the entire year and at a far less cost in 
production than at present. Regarding this gigantic en- 
terprise, Captain Seeman said, in June of 1906, that the 
work would be pushed as rapidly as men, money, and 
machinery could advance it, and, he added : " I consider 
it one of the greatest tunnels ever attempted, and one 
that will hold the record for mining tunnels. I am 
confident that we will strike enough ore within the first 
two or three miles to keep us busy for years." The 
Leviathan is one of the first veins that the tunnel is 
expected to tap, — a vein three hundred feet wide on the 
surface, — and while already traced for more than three 
miles, it holds every promise for as yet uncalculated 
extension. The Lombard is another vein of leading im- 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 37 

portance which promises to be a bonanza. Gold is the 
principal mineral that appears in these veins, although 
silver, lead, and copper are found. Another ore, tung- 
sten, used for hardening in armor plates, large guns, 
and the best mechanical implements, — an ore valued at 
six hundred dollars per ton, — has been discovered in 
these veins. The Seeman Tunnel is located directly under 
James's Peak. 

Another of the remarkable engineering marvels that 
mark the progress of Colorado is the Moffat road, the 
new railroad between Denver and Salt Lake City, now 
open as far as Kremling, which initiated its passenger 
service in the late June of 1906 with daily excursions, in 
solid vestibuled trains, making the round trip between 
Denver and Tolland, Corona (the region of perpetual snow) 
and Arrow, on the Pacific slope of the Continental Divide, 
in one day. This vast enterprise is due to the genius and 
the prophetic vision of President David H. Moffat of the 
First National Bank in Denver, one of the leaders in all 
that makes for the best interests and the advancement of 
the Centennial State, and of the future of Denver the 
Beautiful. Mr. Moffat says : 

" Denver's population is growing steadily and naturally. 
Some time ago I made the prediction that Denver would have 
three hundred thousand inhabitants within five years. I see 
no reason for changing my estimate. Rather, I might in- 
crease it, but I will be conservative. 



38 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

" The things that build up a city's wealth and population 
are 'round about Denver in prodigal quantities. If Denver 
had only the state of Colorado from which to draw, her future 
would be absolutely assured. But consider the vast territory 
that is tributary to this city. It stretches away to the east, 
west, north, and south, an area quite one-third of the whole 
country, and quite the richest in all natural resources. Denver 
is the geographical hub of this territory." 

The Moffat road will climb the ramparts formed by the 
main range of the Rocky Mountains west of Denver and 
run directly westward, passing through one of the most 
fertile sections of the state. The road ascends to an 
altitude of eleven thousand six hundred feet, running 
through a region rich in minerals, and especially in coal. 
The sublime scenery along the route has already made it 
most popular for excursions, which draw a vast tourist 
travel continually. President Moffat's road has brought 
Routt County into such prominence that investors 
from the East are being attracted to this region, a 
notable one among these being the Eastern capitalist, 
C. B. Knox, who proposes to invest in copper, coal, 
and iron in Routt County, which he regards as the 
richest section in Colorado. Mr. Knox engaged the 
services of several experts to examine and report to him 
upon this region. To a press correspondent who in- 
quired of Mr. Knox his views regarding Colorado, 
he said : 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 39 

"I believe that there is wealth unmeasured in Routt 
County, and I ana out here to put some money in there. 
I am sure that this section of the state is one of the richest 
territories in the country. How I became interested is a long 
story, — too long to tell. But it is sufficient to say that 1 have 
heard of Routt County for so long, and from so many different 
people in whose judgment I have the utmost faith, that I have 
come out here to invest some money. I believe thoroughly 
that money put into Routt County will within a few years 
bring handsome returns. If I did not believe that I should 
not be here looking for a place in which to invest money. 

" I have been to Steamboat Springs myself, and I am thor- 
oughly of the opinion that it is going to be one of the big 
towns of your state. The fact is, I have never seen a better 
looking proposition in my life than investing money in Routt 
County. Already I have purchased some land, and I am going 
to get more. It is this iron proposition that I am having 
investigated the most completely. The iron to be found in 
Routt County looks awfully good to me, and there is no 
question in my mind that Routt County is the place to put 
capital. 

"I cannot, of course, at this time say just what properties 
I have in view, — that would not be good business ; but I have 
under investigation locations of mineral property near Steam- 
boat and north and south of there. I have decided on noth- 
ing definite ; that is, as to just what ores I will endeavor to 
exploit, for the whole proposition looks so good to me that I 
am going to purchase probably several different kinds of 



40 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

propositions. As I say, though, I am most interested in the 
iron ore, as that seems to present the greatest opportunities." 

These views are significant not only as those of an 
experienced financier who has unbounded faith in the 
future of Colorado, but also as typical of the wide range 
of vision which is open to the trained eye of the capitalist 
and the organizer of great enterprises. The spellbinder 
may work his will in Colorado. It is the land of infinite 
opportunity. It offers resources totally unsurpassed in the 
entire world for unlimited development, and these resources 
await the recognition of those whose vision is sufficiently 
true to discern the psychological moment. 

The first railroad reached Denver thirty-six years ago, 
and the city has now sixteen railroad lines. It has a 
population of over two hundred and twenty-five thousand. 
It is a geographical centre, which assures its permanent 
importance as a distributing point. With two hundred 
and twenty-five miles of street railway, with seventy-five 
miles of paved streets, and a taxable property estimated 
at one hundred and two and a third millions, Denver 
holds unquestionable commercial importance. 

When, on the evening of July Fourth, 1906, the splendid 
electric flag, with the national colors intensified a thousand 
fold in brilliancy by the electrical lights, floated in the 
air from the dome of the Capitol on its commanding 
eminence, and the new city Arch, a veritable Arc de Tri- 
omphe, flashed its " Welcome " in electrical light to eager 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 41 

throngs, the moment was one which might well have been 
fixed on the sensitive plate of the camera of the future as 
typical of the entire horoscope of Denver the Beautiful. 
On that day had been unveiled this triumphal arch, 
placed at the Seventeenth Street entrance to the city 
from the Union Depot, which, in its sixteen hundred 
electric lights, flashes its legend upon the vision of every 
one entering Denver. This arch, weighing seventy tons, 
eighty feet in length, and with a central height of fifty- 
nine feet, is constructed from a combination of metals 
so united as to give the best results in strength, dura- 
bility, and beauty, and thus to stand as a symbol of the 
composite life of the nation. Over the entire surface has 
been placed a plating of bronze finished with verde an- 
tique^ to thus give it the aspect of ancient bronze. It is 
built at a cost of twenty-two thousand dollars, and the 
originator of the idea, Mr. William Maher of Denver, re- 
ceived the entire subscriptions for it within one day. The 
design is that of a Denver girl, Miss Marie Woodson, 
whose name must always be immortalized in connection 
with this beautiful achievement which typifies the spirit 
of the city. Constructed by one of the city manufacto- 
ries, the design and the execution are thus exclusively 
of Denver. In his address at the unveiling of the arch, 
Chancellor Buchtel said : 

" To all men who stand for honesty, for industry, for jus- 
tice, for reverence, for law, for reverence for life, for education, 



42 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

for self-reliance, for individual initiative, for independence, and 
for sound character, the city of Denver speaks only one word, 
and the state of Colorado speaks only one word, and that 
word we have emblazoned on this glorious Arch, — the word 
{ Welcome.' " 

Dean Hart, offering the Invocation, referred to the 
scriptural fact that God had instructed his leaders to 
build monuments that they might bear witness to some 
act or covenant, and it was right that the people of 
Denver should raise this similar monument to their 
ideals of peace and happiness and truth and justice. 
Mayor Speer, accepting the gift on behalf of the city, 
emphasized the fact that the arch was to stand in its 
place for ages as the expression of the attitude of the 
citizens to the strangers who enter their gates. " It is 
intended to reflect our hospitality,'" said Mayor Speer, 
" on a traveller's arrival and on his departure. It is more 
than a thing of beauty ; it is the type of the new spirit 
in Denver, an awakening of civic pride that is sure to be 
followed by much that is artistic and beautiful in our 
beloved city." 

The spirit of Denver the Beautiful is finely interpreted 
in these words by representative citizens. It is the spirit 
of generous and cordial hospitality to all who are pre- 
pared to enter into and to contribute to its high stand- 
ards of life. It is the spirit of continually forging ahead 
to accomplish things ; of that irresistible energy, com- 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 43 

bined with the eternal vigilance, which is not only the 
price of liberty, but the price of almost everything worth 
having. With this zeal for the great achievements, — 
carrying railroads through the mountains, opening the 
inexhaustible treasures of mines, bringing the snow of 
mountain peaks to irrigate the arid plains, establishing 
electric transit for fifty miles about, and telephonic con- 
nection that brings an area of hundreds of miles into 
instant speaking range with Denver, — with all the zeal 
for these executive accomplishments, the spirit of Denver 
is focussed on that social progress which is aided and 
fostered by all modern mechanical facilities. Education, 
culture, and religion are nowhere more held as the essen- 
tials of social progress than in Denver. Something of the 
nature of the problems of civilization that confronted 
the early pathfinders in Colorado may be inferred from 
the words of Major Long, — whose name is now perpet- 
uated by the mountain peak that bears it, — when, in 
1862, he stated, in an official report to the government : 

" This region, according to the best intelligence that can 
be had, is thoroughly uninhabitable by a people depending on 
agriculture for their subsistence, but, viewed as a frontier, 
may prove of infinite importance to the United States, inas- 
much as it is calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too 
great an extension of our population westward and secure us 
against the machinations or incursions of an enemy that 
might otherwise be disposed to annoy us in that quarter." 



44 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Less than sixty-five years have passed since the region 
of which Denver is the great centre was thus pronounced 
useless except as a frontier to serve as protection from an 
enemy, and this judgment reminds one of a keen insight 
into the evolutionary progress of life expressed by Mrs. 
Julia Ward Howe when she remarked that " Every gene- 
ration makes a fool of the one that went before it.' 7 
Colorado, pronounced "thoroughly uninhabitable " in 
1842, was organized as a territory in 1861 and in 1876 
admitted as a state. 

Darwin, who regarded " climate and the affections " as 
the only absolute necessities of terrestrial existence, 
should have lived in Denver, for of all the beautiful cli- 
mates is that in which revels the capital of Colorado. The 
air is all liquid gold from sunrise till sunset ; the moun- 
tains swim in a sea of azure blue ; the ground is bare and 
dry in winter, affording the best of walking, and there are 
few cities where the general municipal management exceeds 
or is, perhaps, even as good as that of Denver. The 
electric street-car service is on schedule time, and the two 
hundred and twenty-five miles of its extent already, with 
increase in the near future, is certainly an achievement 
for a young city. Nature is a potent factor in this excel- 
lent service, as there is no blocking by heavy snowstorms 
and blizzards, as in the Middle West and the East. 

The gazer in the magic mirror of the future requires 
little aid from the imagination to see, in the growth and 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 45 

development of Denver, an impressive illustration of the 
significance of the name of the state of which it is the 
capital and the keynote. With what felicitous destiny is 
the name invested in the old Castilian phrase, " A Dios 
con le Colorado" (Go thou merrily with God), — a parting 
salutation and benediction. Denver is, indeed, more than 
a state capital ; it is the epitome of the great onward 
march of civilization, and it must always be considered 
in its wide relations to all the great Southwest as well as in 
respect to its own municipal individuality. 

No citizen of Denver has contributed more to the 
moral and intellectual quality of the city as one of 
the conductors of great enterprises held amenable to the 
higher ideals of citizenship, than has Mr. S. K. Hooper of 
the Denver and Rio Grande, which is one of the mar- 
vels of the West in scenic glory. From May till October 
pleasure tourists throng this marvellous route through the 
Royal Gorge, through mysterious canons and across the 
Divide. For it must always be remembered that Denver 
is a great city for tourists and season visitors, and the 
floating population exceeds a hundred thousand annually. 
Beautiful as it is in the winter, Denver is also essentially a 
summer city. There is not a night in the summer when 
the wind, cool, refreshing, exhilarating, does not blow from 
the great rampart of the snow-clad, encircling mountains. 
There is not a morning when the wind does not come 
again, sending the blood leaping through the veins, while 



46 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the sun rides across the heavens in a glory of brilliancy, 
and the great range rears its white head to the cloudless 
blue sky. 

The Denver Art League is a flourishing association that 
has under its auspices classes in drawing, water colors, 
and sculpture. Already many artists of Colorado are 
winning a name. A new Public Library is now in process 
of erection, and the Chamber of Commerce also maintains 
a free library of some twenty -five thousand volumes, 
the reading-room open every day in the year. The 
city appropriates six thousand dollars a year for the 
expenses of this institution. 

The educational standards of Denver are high. Draw- 
ing, music, and German are included among the studies 
of the grammar schools, and physical culture is introduced 
in each grade. The high school building cost a quarter of 
a million dollars, and stands second in the entire country 
in point of architectural beauty and admirable arrange- 
ments. Besides the splendid public-school system there is 
the University of Denver, a few miles from the city ; St. 
Mary's (Catholic) Academy, and two large (Episcopal) 
schools for girls and boys, respectively, — "Wolfe Hall" 
and St. John's College. The Woman's College and West- 
minster University complete this large group of edu- 
cational institutions which centre in Denver. There is 
also the University of Colorado at Boulder, which has 
established a record for success under the able admin- 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 47 

istration of Dr. James H. Baker, who, in January of 
1892, was called to the presidency after having served 
as principal of the Denver High School for seventeen 
years. President Baker is well known in educational 
circles in the United States as a scholarly man and a 
capable college president. He has been offered the presi- 
dency of other State universities from time to time, but 
has preferred to remain in Boulder and to concentrate his 
efforts toward making this institution one of the largest 
and best of the state universities. He has always been 
active in the State Teachers' Association and the National 
Council of Education. 

For three years past the University of Colorado has 
held a summer school with a large attendance of teachers 
and college students. In this past season of 1906, Pro- 
fessor Paul Hamus of Harvard University gave a valuable 
course of lectures on education, and Professor Hart, also 
of Harvard, conducted a course in history. 

Over a hundred and fifteen thousand pupils are enrolled 
in the public schools of Denver, including all grades, from 
the primary to the high school. The latter offers the full 
equivalent of a college education freely to all. 

The churches of Denver are numerous, and include 
many fine edifices besides the large granite Methodist 
Church that cost over a quarter of a million dollars. 
It is not, however, only the church structures that are 
noble and impressive, but the preaching in them is of 



48 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

an unusually high order of both intellectual power and 
spiritual aspiration. The keen, critical life of Colorado's 
capital demands the best thought of the day. The 
wonderful exhilaration of the atmosphere seems to exert 
its influence on all life as a universal inspiration. 

The new building for the Denver Public Library is 
under process of construction, an appropriation of a 
quarter of a million dollars having been made for the 
edifice, which will stand in a small triangular park, in- 
suring air and lighb, and giving to its approach a stately 
and beautiful dignity. 

The Colorado capital is tending to fulfil the poet's 
ideal of affording 

" room in the streets for the soul." 

The life is most delightful. Without any undue and 
commonplace formalities, yet always within that fine 
etiquette which is the unconscious result of good breeding, 
the meeting and mingling has a cordial and sincere basis 
that lends significance to social life. The numerous clubs, 
and the associations for art and music, for Italian, French, 
and German readings, are all vital and prominent in the 
city, and the political equality of woman imparts to 
conversation a tone of wider thought and higher im- 
portance than is elsewhere invariably found. 

Denver, which should be the capital city of the 
United States, is pre-eminently the convention city. 



DENVER THE BEAUTIFUL 49 

Even with all the beauty of Washington and the vast 
sums that have been expended within the past fifteen 
years in the incomparable structure for the Library of Con- 
gress, and in other fine public buildings, and the splendor 
of the private residence region, — even with all this, and 
the fact that the Capitol itself is one of the notable 
architectural creations of the world, the nation is great 
enough and rich enough to found a new capital which 
should far surpass the present one, however fine that 
present one may be. However great are the treasures 
of art and architecture in Washington, the change could 
be, even now, made with the greatest advantage for the 
future. Within a quarter of a century all that invests 
Washington with such charm in architectural beauty 
and in art could be more than duplicated in Denver. 
The nation has wealth enough, and the most modern 
ideas and inspirations in these lines surpass those of any 
previous age or decade. The present is " the heir of all 
the ages.'" 

No one need marvel that Denver ranks as the west- 
ern metropolis of the Union, with its delightful climate, 
its infinite interests, its centre as a point for charming 
excursions, and its sixteen railroad lines. 

In this atmosphere of opportunity and privilege there 
is, indeed, " room for the soul " and all that the poet's 
phrase suggests. There is room for all noble and gener- 
ous development ; for the expansion of the spirit to ex- 



50 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

press itself in all loveliness of life, all splendid energy 
of achievement ; and in all that makes for the supreme 
aim of a nation, — that of a Christian civilization, — 
no city can offer greater scope than does Denver the 
Beautiful. 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 51 



CHAPTER III 

THE PICTURESQUE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 

"And ever the spell of beauty came 
And turned the drowsy world to flame." 

Emerson 

In the picturesque region of Pike's Peak there is grouped 
such an array of scenic wonders as are unrivalled, within 
the limits of any corresponding area, in the entire world. 
To this region Colorado Springs is the gateway, and the 
poetic little city is already famous as one of the world 
resorts whose charm is not exclusively restricted to the 
summer. The winter is also alluring, for Colorado is the 
land of perpetual sunshine. One turns off the steam heat 
and sits with open windows in December. The air is 
electric, exhilarating. The cogwheel road up Pike's Peak 
is stopped ; but almost any of the other excursions one 
can take as enjoyably as in summer. The East is, ap- 
parently, under the delusion that the land is covered 
with snow up to the very summit of Pike's Peak. On 
the contrary, the ground is bare and dry ; the birds are 
singing, the sun shines for all, and the everlasting hills 
silhouette themselves against the blue sky in all their 



52 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

grandeur. One easily slips into all the charm and fascina- 
tion of Colorado days through these resplendent winters, 
when there are two hours more of light and sunshine 
in Colorado, on account of its altitude, than in any 
state to the eastward. The climate of Colorado Springs 
has a perfection that is remarked even in the Centennial 
State, where, in every part, the climate is unsurpassed in 
sunshine and exhilaration. Especially, however, is Colo- 
rado Springs a summer resort, as is Saratoga or Newport 
or Bar Harbor. Its season is increasingly brilliant and 
crowded. People come to stay a day and prolong it to a 
week, or come for a week and prolong their stay to a 
month. The driving is fine, the motor cars are abundant, 
the excursions are delightful, and the air is as curative and 
exhilarating as is possible to conceive. The inner glories 
of the Rocky Mountains, with their vast canons and giant 
peaks ; their waterfalls dashing over precipices hundreds 
of feet in height; the fascinating glens and mesas for 
camping excursions, or for scientific research and study, 
are all reached by this gateway of Colorado Springs. 

Pike's Peak, this stupendous continental monument, 
dominates the entire region. The atmospheric effects 
around its summit offer a perpetual panorama of kaleido- 
scopic changes of color and cloud-forms. Looking out on 
the Peak from Colorado Springs, three miles from its base, 
there are hours when it seems to be actually approaching 
with such swift though stately measure that one involun- 



THE REGION OF PIKES PEAK 53 

tarily shrinks back from the window in irrational alarm 
lest the grim monster shall bear down upon it, with a 
force inevitable as Fate ; disastrous as a colossal iceberg 
wandering from Polar seas and sweeping down with irre- 
sistible force against the side of a transatlantic liner. 
In a lightning flash of instantaneous, unreasoning vision, 
one beholds in imagination the impending destruction 
of a city. It becomes a thing endowed with volition ; a 
wierd, uncanny monster, the abode of the gods who have 
reared their monuments and established their pleasure- 
grounds in their strange, fantastic garden at its foot. 

Again, the Peak enfolds itself in clouds and, secure in 
this drapery, retires altogether from sight, as if weary of 
being the object of public view. It is as if the inmates 
of a house, feeling an invasion of public interest, should 
turn off the lights, draw the curtains, and close the shut- 
ters as a forcible intimation of their preference for pri- 
vacy and their decision to exclude the madding crowd. 
Sometimes the Peak will flaunt itself in glorious apparel 
and gird itself in strength. With light it will deck itself 
as with a garment. It surprises a sunrise with the reflec- 
tion of glory transfigured into unspeakable resplendence. 
It is the royal monarch to which every inhabitant of the 
Pike's Peak region, every sojourner in the land, must pay 
his tribute. The day is fair or foul according as Pike's 
Peak shall smile or frown. All the cycles of the eternal 
ages have left on its summit their records, — the silent and 



54 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

hidden romance of the air. The scientist alone may trans- 
late this aerial hieroglyphic. 

" Omens and signs that fill the air 
To him authentic witness bear." 

This monumental peak of the continent shrouds in 
oblivion its mystic past, and still the handwriting on 
the wall may be read by him who holds the key to all 
this necromancy. The record of the ages is written on 
parchment that will never crumble. The mysteries of the 
very creation itself, — of all this vast and marvellous 
West, — of infinite expanse of sea and of volcanic fires 
that swallowed up the waters and crystallized them into 
granite and porphyry, — this very record of Titanic proc- 
esses is written, in mystic characters, in that far upper air 
where the lofty Peak reigns in unapproachable majesty. 
For while there are other peaks in the Rocky Mountains 
as high, — and Long's Peak even exceeds it in altitude, — 
there is no other which rises so distinctly alone and which 
so supremely dominates an infinite plateau that extends, 
like the ocean, beyond the limit of vision. 

There is one glory of the moon and another glory of 
the stars, as well as the glory of the sun, in this mountain 
region of Colorado Springs. The sunsets over the moun- 
tains are marked by the most gorgeous phenomena of color 
before whose intensity all the hues of a painter's palette 
pale. The gates of the New Jerusalem seem to open. 





M foil 





THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 55 

Great masses of billowy clouds in deepest, burning gold 
hang in the air ; the rainbow hues of all the summers that 
have shone upon earth since the first rainbow was set in 
the heavens, reflect themselves in a thousand shimmering 
cloud-shapes. It is one of the definite things of the tour- 
ist's day to watch from the western terrace of " The 
Antlers " these unrivalled sunset effects ; and when, later 
(still in compliance with the unwritten laws that prevail in 
the Empire of Transcendent Beauty), dinner is served at 
small tables on the terrace, — where the flowers that form the 
centrepiece of each table, the gleam of exquisite cut glass 
and silver, and the music from an orchestra hidden behind 
the palms and tall roses that fling a thousand fragrances 
on the enchanted air all blend as elements of the faery 
scene whose background is a panoramic picture of moun- 
tains and sky, — the visitor realizes an atmosphere of en- 
chantment that one might well cross a continent to gain. 

Again, there is the glory of the night. A young moon 
glances shyly over the mountain summit and swiftly retires 
to her mysterious realms on the other side. Each ensuing 
night she ventures still further afield, gazing still longer 
at the world she is visiting before she again wings her 
flight down the western sky, pausing, for a tremulous 
moment, on the very crest of the mountains ere she is lost 
to sight in the vague distance beyond. The stars come 
and go in impressive troops and processions. They float 
up from behind the mountains till one questions as to 



56 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

whether the other side is not a vast realm of star-dust in 
process of crystallizing into planets and stars. Has one, 
then, at last arrived at the Land that is the forge of the 
gods who create it? May one here surprise the very 
secrets of the Universe? Perhaps some dim, mysterious 
under-world lies over that colossal range in which celestial 
mechanism is at work sending forth and withdrawing the 
shining planetary visitants, so continuous is the procession 
of stars through all the hours of the night. Each star, as it 
rises over the mountains or sets behind them, pauses for an 
instant on the crest for a preliminary survey, or a parting 
glance, of the world it is entering or leaving. 

It is still in the realms of doubt as to whether there 
may be discovered a royal road to learning ; but a royal 
road to the summit of Pike's Peak, more than fourteen 
thousand feet above sea level, has been, since 1890, an 
accomplished fact in the Manitou and Pike's Peak cog- 
wheel road, starting from Engleman's Glen, one of the 
famous resorts of Manitou. This lovely town, that dreams 
away its summer at the base of Pike's Peak guarded by 
precipitous mountain walls, is connected with Colorado 
Springs by electric trolley, and the little journey of four 
miles is one of the pleasure excursions of the region. The 
route lies past the " Garden of the Gods," where the 
curious shapes of red sandstone loom up like spectral 
forms in some Inferno. 

Like Naples, Colorado Springs is the paradise of the 



THE REGION OF PIKES PEAK 57 

tourist, offering a new excursion for every day in the sea- 
son ; and there are few of these whose route does not in- 
clude lovely Manitou, which is also the objective point 
from which to fare forth on this journey above the clouds, 
into those mysterious realms where he who listens aright 
may hear spoken the words which it is not lawful for man 
to utter. The journey into aerial spaces opens in a defile 
of one of the deep canons, the train on the one hand 
clinging to the wall, while on the other one looks down a 
vast precipice, at the foot of which dashes a river over 
gigantic boulders. The route is diversified by the little 
stations on the way, — Minnehaha, whose waterfall indeed 
laughs in the air, and is given back in a thousand ghostly 
echoes ; the Half- Way House, nestling under the pinna- 
cled rocks of Hell Gate — must one always pass through 
the portals of Hades on his way to Paradise ? Strange 
and grotesque scenery companions the way. On the 
mountain-side one finds — of all things — a newspaper 
office, where a souvenir daily paper is issued with all the 
news of that new world above the clouds, Pike's Peak. 
The ascent is very steep in places. The verdure of the 
foothills vanishes, the trees cease to invade this upper 
air, and only the dwarfed aspen shivers in the breeze as 
it clings to some barren rock. New vistas open. The 
world of day and daylight duties is left behind. Gaunt, 
spectral rocks in uncanny shapes haunt the way. The 
air grows chill ; car windows are closed, and warm wraps 



58 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

are at a premium. But the scene below ! The sensation 
of looking down on the clouds, the view of Lake Moraine, 
an inland sea high in the mountains ; the new sensations 
of the rarefied air, — all these seem to initiate one into a 
new world. From the summit, reached in a journey of 
ninety minutes, the view can only be described as that of 
unspeakable awe and sublimity. An expanse of sixty 
thousand miles is open to the gaze. To the west rise 
a thousand towering peaks, snow clad, in a majesty of 
effect beyond power of portrayal. To the east the vast 
plateaus stretch into infinite space. Below, the sun shines 
on floating clouds in all gleams of color. In the steel 
tower of the new Summit Hotel is a powerful telescope 
that brings Denver, eighty miles distant, into near and 
distinct view. In Colorado Springs, fourteen miles "as 
the crow flies," the telescopic view even reveals the signs 
on the streets so they may be plainly read. In close 
range of vision appear Pueblo, Cripple Creek, Victor, 
Goldfield, Independence, and Manitou. 

The surface of the top of Pike's Peak comprises several 
acres of level land thickly strewn with large blocks of 
rough granite of varying size, — blocks that are almost 
wholly in a regular rectangular shape, as if prepared for 
some Titanic scheme of architecture. The highest tele- 
graph office in the world is located here, and the usual 
souvenir shop of every summer resort offers its tempting 
remembrances, all of which are closely associated with the 



THE REGION OF PIKES PEAK 59 

genus loci, and are all a very part of the Colorado pro- 
ductions. A powerful searchlight was placed on Pike's 
Peak during the summer of 1906, adding the most pic- 
turesque feature of night to all the surrounding country. 
Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, the Cripple Creek dis- 
trict, the deep canons of the Cheyenne range, the silvery 
expanse of Broadmoor, whose attractive casino is a centre 
of evening gatherings, — all these points in the great land- 
scape are swept with the illumination from the highest 
searchlight in the world to-day. 

A century has passed since Major Zebulon Mont- 
gomery Pike first discovered the shadowy crest of the 
mountain peak that immortalizes his name. It was on 
November 13, 1806, that the attention of Major Pike 
and his party was arrested by what at first looked to 
them as a light blue cloud in the sky, toward which 
they marched for ten days before arriving at the base 
of the mountain. The story of this journey is one of the 
dramatic records in the national archives. Major Pike 
and his men left St. Louis on July 15, 1806, on his trip to 
the Rocky Mountains, or Mexican Mountains as he called 
them at the time. He pronounced the country through 
which he travelled to be so devoid of sustenance for 
human beings that it would serve as a barrier, for all 
time, in the expansion of the United States. In vivid 
contrast are the conditions to-day. Major Pike could now 
make his journey from St. Louis to Pike's Peak over 



60 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

either of several grand trunk railways equipped with all 
the modern luxuries of travel. Where he passed great 
herds of buffalo, he would now see cattle grazing in equal 
numbers on the prairies. The vast plains that paralyzed 
his imagination by their desolate aspects are now dotted 
with prosperous farms or ranches. The mountains that 
appealed to him only for their scenic grandeur have been 
found to be the treasure vaults of nature that were 
only waiting to be conquered by the hardy frontiersmen 
who followed him nearly half a century later. The great 
white mountain that he declared could not be ascended by 
a human being is now the objective point of a hundred 
thousand tourists annually, who gayly climb the height 
in a swift trip made in a luxurious Pullman observa- 
tion car. The first attempt of the Pike party to 
ascend the peak was a failure, and Major Pike expressed 
his opinion that "no human being could ascend to its 
pinnacle. 1 ' In 1819 Hon. John C. Calhoun, then 
Secretary of War, sent Major Long and a party on an 
expedition to the Rocky Mountains, then almost as 
unknown as the Himalayas. This exploring party 
camped on the present site of Colorado Springs, and 
on July 13 (1819) started to ascend the peak. On the 
first day they made only two miles, as the ground was 
covered with loose, crumbling granite. On the second 
day, however, they succeeded ; the first ascent of Pike's 
Peak thus having been made on July 14, 1819. A 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 61 

chronicle of this ascent describes the point above 
which the timber line disappears as one " of aston- 
ishing beauty and of great interest as to its produc- 
tions." The first woman to stand on the summit of 
Pike's Peak was Mrs. James H. Holmes, in August 
of 1858. 

General Zebulon Montgomery Pike achieved distinction 
both as an explorer and a brave soldier. He was but 
twenty-seven years of age when he was chosen to lead the 
most important military expedition of the day, and eight 
years later, as Brigadier-General, he commanded the 
troops that captured the British stronghold at York 
(now Toronto), Canada, and here he met his death, which 
has been compared to that of Nelson. The captured flag 
of the enemy was placed under the head of the dying 
general to ease his pain. The cheers of his soldiers 
aroused the young commander, and on being told that 
the fort was captured, he closed his eyes with the words, 
" I die content." 

In his notebook were found the maxims that had guided 
him through life, dedicated to his son, among which were 
" Preserve your honor free from blemish," and " Be always 
ready to die for your country." 

General Pike was buried with full military honors in 
the government plot at Madison Barracks, New York. A 
modest shaft marks the resting place of the heroic soldier- 
explorer, and on Cascade Avenue in Colorado Springs, 



62 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

directly in front of " The Antlers, -1 ' there is placed a statue 
of the heroic discoverer of the mighty Peak which forever 
perpetuates his name. 

No adequate life of Pike has ever been written ; but 
with the monumental majesty of the mid-continental 
mountain peak that proclaims his name to all future 
centuries, what room can there be for biographical record 
or sculptured memorial ? The archives of the Department 
of War, in Washington, contain his diary, kept from day 
to day in this march from St. Louis to Colorado. After 
his discovery of the Peak, Major Pike returned to the place 
where now the city of Pueblo stands, continuing his jour- 
ney into the mountains, thence to New Mexico, where he 
was captured by the Spaniards. Hardships of every de- 
scription were suffered by the party before being placed 
in captivity at Santa Fe ; but even the capture of his 
papers by the Spaniards at Santa Fe did not serve to 
destroy the records of the astute young soldier, who had 
carefully concealed duplicates of his papers in the barrel of 
his big flintlock rifle, and he was afterward able to restore 
them to original form. Major Pike was as tender and 
humane as he was brave. In the capture of the party by 
the Spanish two of the men had to be abandoned and left 
to their fate in the hills. They were given a small supply 
of provisions, with the assurance that they would be rescued 
if the rest of the party found a haven of safety and rest. 
Major Pike kept this promise and, more nearly dead than 



THE REGION OF PIKES PEAK 63 

alive, these men were brought into Santa Fe by the 
Spanish soldiers. 

Well might it have been of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, 
in his first eager march toward this "blue cloud' 1 that 
beckoned him on and proved to be a vast mountain peak, 
— well might it have been this hero that Emerson thus 
pictured in the lines : 

" The free winds told him what they knew, 
Discoursed of fortune as they blew ; 
Omens and signs that filled the air 
To him authentic witness bear ; 
The birds brought auguries on their wings, 
And carolled undeceiving things 
Him to beckon, him to warn ; 
Well might then the poet scorn 
To learn of scribe or courier 
Things writ in vaster character ; 
And on his mind at dawn of day 
Soft shadows of the evening lay." 

In his diary, kept during the march from St. Louis, 
Major Pike thus pictured his first impressions of Colorado : 

"The scene was one of the most sublime and beautiful 
inland prospects ever presented to man ; the great lofty 
mountains, covered with eternal snow, seemed to surround 
the luxuriant vale, crowned with perennial flowers, like a 
terrestrial paradise." 

The memory of this hero cannot but invest Colorado 
Springs with a certain consecration of heroism that be- 



64 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

comes, indeed, part of the "omens and signs " that fill 
the air. 

In the early autumn of 1906 Colorado Springs and 
Manitou celebrated the centenary of the discovery of 
Pike's Peak with appropriate ceremonies. One of the 
interesting features was the rendering of an " Ode " 
by a chorus of one thousand voices, of which the 
words were written by Charles J. Pike of New York, 
the well-known sculptor, a great-nephew of General 
Pike, and for which the music was composed by Rubin 
Gold mark. 

One of the noted excursions of the Pike's Peak region 
is the " Temple Drive,"" — a carriage road beginning in 
Manitou, traversing Williams Canon, and, climbing its 
west wall. The drive offers near views of the Temple of 
Isis, the Cathedral of St. Peter, the Narrows, and of St. 
Peter's Gate in the Cathedral Dome. It is fairly a drive 
in elfland, and is as distinctive a feature of Colorado 
Springs life as is the famous drive from Naples to Amalfi 
and Sorrento a feature of the enchantment of Southern 
Italy. Manitou Park is easily reached by motor or car- 
riage drive from Colorado Springs through the picturesque 
Ute Pass, and aside from its beauty it has an added in- 
terest in having been presented to Colorado College by 
General William J. Palmer and Dr. William A. Bell, to 
be used as the field laboratory of the new Colorado School of 
Forestry. Manitou Park contains cottages and recreation 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 65 

halls, so that all sorts of hospitalities and entertainments 
can be there enjoyed. 

Of the " Garden of the Gods " who can analyze the 
curious, mystic spell of the place ? A large tract of roll- 
ing mesas is covered with these uncanny monsters of rocks 
in all weird and grotesque forms. The deep red sandstone 
of their formation gives it the aspect, under a midday sun 
nr the slanting rays of a brilliant sunset, of being all on 
tire — a kind of inferno, foreign to earth, and revealed, 
momentarily, from some underworld of mystery. 

Chevenne Canon is one of the most poetically touched 
places in all the Pike's Peak region. Of Cheyenne moun- 
tain Helen Hunt Jackson wrote : 

" By easy slope to west, as if it had 
No thought, when first its soaring was begun, 
Except to look devoutly to the sun, 
It rises and has risen, until glad, 
With light as with a garment it is clad, 
Each dawn before the tardy plains have won 
One ray, and after day has long been done 
For us the light doth cling reluctant, sad to leave its brow. " 

Poets and artists have embodied it in song and essayed to 
transfer it to canvas ; but the grandeur of South Cheyenne 
Canon eludes every artist while it impresses the imagina- 
tion of everv visitor. It is fitly approached through the 
" Pillars of Hercules,' 1 — sheer perpendicular walls of rock 
looking up over one thousand feet high, with a passage- 
way of only forty feet. Once within the canon and one 

5 



66 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

might as well have been translated to Mars so far as utter 
isolation can be realized. In the dim green twilight from 
the lofty wooded cliffs toward the Seven Falls one enters 
on " the twilight of the gods," not dark, but a soft light, 
the sun shut out, the air vibrating with faint hints of 
color, the colossal granite walls rising into the sky, the 
faint dash of waterfalls heard plashing over hidden rocks 
and stones ; a rill here and there trickling down the moun- 
tain side ; the far call of some lonely bird heard far away 
in the upper air ; and the soft, mysterious light, the dim 
coolness and fragrance, the glimpse of blue sky just seen 
in the narrow opening above — was anything ever so en- 
chantingly poetic? It is here one might well materialize 
his castle d'Espagne. Winding up the canon, one comes 
to " Seven Falls," — a torrent of water rushing down 
mighty cliffs on one side of a colossal amphitheatre, and 
the precipitous cliffs show seven distinct terraces down 
which the foaming torrent plunges. 

In North Cheyenne and in Bear CreeK Canons the 
grandeur is repeated, and in those the people find a 
vast free recreation ground. This privilege is again one 
of the innumerable ones that are due to the gifts and 
grace of General Palmer, who has had this sublime locality 
made into a practicable resort, with pavilions where tea, 
coffee, lemonade, ices, and sandwiches are served ; a rustic 
hostelry, " Bruin Inn," is also provided as a place of refuge 
and entertainment, providing against any disasters in the 




SEVEN FALLS, CHEYENNE CANON, NEAB 
COLORADO SPRINGS. COLORADO 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 67 

sudden storms that are so frequent in these canon regions ; 
and the bridle paths, the terraced drives on the mountain 
walls, and the glades where games may be played, all 
make South Cheyenne the most unique pleasure resort 
of that of any city in the United States. 

In all these canons the massive, precipitous granite 
walls, which seem to rise almost to the sky, are also ren- 
dered more arresting to the eye by their richly variegated 
coloring. These ragged cliffs rise, too, in pinnacles and 
towers and domes that proclaim their warfare with the 
elements for ages innumerable. Visitors familiar with 
all the Alpine gorges and with the Yosemite agree that 
in no one of these are there such majesty of effects as in 
the Cheyenne canons. 

Manitou, the Indian name for the Great Spirit, is an 
alluring place in a nook of the mountains at the foot of 
Pike's Peak, reminding one of the Swiss- Alpine villages. 
Ute Pass ; Williams Canon, in which is the noted " Cave 
of the Winds " ; the famous " Temple Drive " ; Cascade, 
Green Mountain Falls and Glen Eyrie are all grouped 
near Manitou, and it is here that the cogwheel road 
ascending Pike's Peak begins. The Mineral Springs are 
approached in a pavilion with two or three large rooms ; 
the auditorium, where an orchestra plays every afternoon, 
seats some two hundred people, who can listen to the 
music, sip their glasses of mineral water, and chat with 
friends, all at one and the same time. There is a foreign 



68 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

air about Manitou. The little town consists of one 
street extending along the canon, following its curves, 
with a few cottages perched on terraces above, and the 
hotels, boarding-houses, and the little shops, with the 
hawkers of curios at their street stands, make up a pictur- 
esque spectacle. The shop windows glisten with jewelry 
made from the native Colorado stones, the amethyst, opal, 
topaz, emerald, tourmaline, and moonstone being found 
more or less extensively in this state. The native ores are 
exposed ; Indian wares, from the bright Navajo rugs and 
blankets to the pottery, baskets, and beaded work ; photo- 
graphs and picture cards of all kinds, and trinkets galore, 
of almost every conceivable description, give a gala-day 
aspect to the little mountain town. The surrounding 
peaks rise to the height of six and eight thousand feet 
above the street, which looks like a toy set in a region 
designed for the habitation of the gods. American life, 
however, keeps the pace, and in this mountain defile at 
the foot of Pike's Peak were the signs out announcing a 
"Psychic Palmist;' a " Scientific Palmist," and a " Thought 
Healer," by which it will be inferred that an up-to-date 
civilization has by no means failed to penetrate to Mani- 
tou. Each year the accommodations for travellers multiply 
themselves. Each summer the demand increases. There 
is a fascination about Manitou that throws its spell over 
every visitor and sojourner. 

The Grand Caverns are on the side of one of the pic- 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 69 

turesque mountains, reached by a drive through the Ute 
Pass. Beyond Rainbow Falls, and entering the vestibule 
of these caverns, the visitor finds himself under a lofty 
dome from which stalactites hang, and in which is a pile 
of stones being raised to the memory of General Grant, 
each visitor adding one. No form of memorial to the 
great military commander, whose character was at once 
so impressive and so simple, could be more fitting than is 
this tribute. From the vestibule one wanders to Alabas- 
ter Hall, where there are groups of snow-white columns 
of pure alabaster. In a vast space sixty feet high, with 
a dome of Nature's chiselling and two galleries that are 
curiously wrought by natural forces, there is a natural 
grand organ, formed of stalactites, with wonderful rever- 
berations and with a rich, deep tremulous tone. To reveal 
its marvels to visitors a skilled musician is employed, who 
renders on it popular selections, to the amazement of all 
who are present. Another feature of the Grand Caverns 
is the "jewel caskets" where gems encased in limestone 
reflect the glow of a lamp. There is also the " card 
room," with its columns and its pictorial effects ; the 
"Lovers 1 Lane" and the "Bridal Chamber," filled with 
translucent formations in all curious shapes and hints of 
color. 

The marvellous achievements of the engineer in encir- 
cling the mountains with steel tracks on which cars climb 
to the summit are seen, in perhaps their most remarkable 



70 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

degree of development in conquering the problems of 
mountain engineering in Colorado. Of all these achieve- 
ments, one of the most conspicuous triumphs is that 
known as the " Short Line " between Colorado Springs 
and Cripple Creek, a distance only forty-five miles, and the 
time some two and a half hours ; but within these limits 
is comprised the most unspeakably sublime panorama of 
mountain scenery. As the train begins to wind up the 
mountains one looks down on the flaming, rose-red splen- 
dor of the Garden of the Gods, — with its uncanny 
shapes, its domes and curious formations. Climbing up, 
the vast plain below — a plain, even though it is six 
thousand feet above sea level — looks like a sea of silver. 
The railroad crosses Bear Creek Canon on a narrow iron 
bridge and threads its way again on the terraced trunk of 
the opposite mountain up to Point Sublime, — a gigantic 
rock towering on a mountain crest. A landscape un- 
folds that rivals Church's wonderful " Heart of the 
Andes " in its fascination. Entering South Cheyenne, the 
beauty and grandeur of the eastern end of the canon are 
seen by following the narrow course between its rugged 
granite sides hundreds of feet in height, reaching a 
magnificent and most impressive climax at the wonder- 
ful Seven Falls. No visit to the Pike's Peak region can 
be considered complete without this trip through South 
Cheyenne Canon. 

The usual feature of the situation as trains circle around 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 71 

the rim of these canons is that their beauty is seen from 
above. A short stroll and one finds himself between walls 
towering a thousand feet above his head. The beauty is 
all around and above. The tops of the mountains seem 
very far away, and lost in clouds. But in the train the 
situation is reversed ; for, seated in a luxurious observa- 
tion car of the " Short Line," the tourist is carried above the 
peaks and canon walls, which from below seem inaccessible 
in their height, and from this startling elevation one looks 
down on an underworld of strange and mysterious forms. 
St. Peter's Dome, as it is called, looks down from its tower- 
ing height with the national colors flying from its summit, 
— a huge mass of granite that seems to stand alone and 
to guard the secrets of the depths below. 

The ascent of St. Peter's Dome is a triumph of engi- 
neering skill. As the train glides along, and glory suc- 
ceeds to glory, vista to vista, and canon to canon, in ever 
changing but constant charm, the dizzy height is climbed 
apparently with so much ease that the traveller, absorbed 
in the entrancing surroundings, reaches the top before he 
is aware of it. It seems impossible that the track seen 
on the opposite side of the canon hundreds of feet above 
should be the path the train is to follow ; but a few turns, 
almost imperceptible, so smooth is the roadbed, and one 
looks down on the place just passed with equal wonder, and 
asks if that can be the track by which he has come. As 
the train climbs the side or rounds the point of each raoun- 



72 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

tain peak, the matchless view of the plains is unfolded 
before the enraptured gaze. All description is baffled; 
any attempt to reproduce in words the glory of that scene 
is impossible. Every tourist in the Pike's Peak region 
regards the " Short Line " trip as the very crown of the 
summer's excursions, or, in the local phrase, one whose 
sublimity of beauty "bankrupts the English language."" 
These forty-five miles not only condense within their 
limits the grandeur one might reasonably anticipate dur- 
ing a transcontinental journey of three thousand miles, 
but as an achievement of mountain engineering, railway 
experts in both Europe and America have pronounced 
it the most substantially built and the finest equipped 
mountain railroad in the world. It was opened in 1901, 
and, quite irrespective of any interest felt in visiting 
the gold camps of Cripple Creek, the " Short Line " has 
become the great excursion which all visitors to Colo- 
rado desire to make for the sublime effects of the scenery. 
A prominent civil engineer in Colorado said, in answer to 
some question regarding the problem of taking trains over 
mountain ranges and peaks that, given the point to start 
from and the point to reach, and sufficient capital, there 
was no difficulty in carrying a railroad anywhere. The 
rest is, he said, only a question of time and skill. The con- 
struction of the "Short Line"" reveals the achievement 
of carrying a railroad around the rims of mountains and 
over the tops of canons rather than that of following a 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 73 

trail through the bottom of the canons. As a scenic 
success this feat is unparalleled. The bewildering mag- 
nificence, the incomparable sublimity, as the train winds 
up St. Peter's Dome, are beyond the power of painter or 
poet to picture. Leaving Colorado Springs, the tourist 
sees the strange towering pinnacles of the Garden of the 
Gods, in their deep red contrasting with the green back- 
ground of trees ; Manitou gleams from its deep canon ; 
the towers and spires of Colorado Springs appear in 
miniature from the far height, and the great expanse of 
the plateau looks like the sea. It is difficult to realize 
that one is still gazing upon land. The ascent is more 
like the experience in an aero-car than in a railroad train, 
so swift is the upward journey. The first little station on 
this route is Point Sublime, where the clouds and the 
mountain peaks meet and mingle. North Cheyenne Canon 
is seen far below, and in the distance is fair Broad- 
moor with its Crescent Lake gleaming like silver. The 
Silver Cascade Falls sparkle in the air hundreds of feet up 
the crags. At Fair View the North and South Cheyenne 
Canons meet, — those two scenic gorges whose fame is 
world-wide, — and from one point the traveller gazes down 
into each, the bottom depths so remote as to be invisi- 
ble. These precipices are wooded, so that the aspect 
is that of sheer walls of green. St. Peter's Dome 
almost pierces the sky, and as the train finally gains 
the summit a vista of incomparable magnificence opens, 



74 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

— of canons and peaks and towering rocks, — and through 
one canon is seen Pueblo, over fifty miles distant, but 
swept up in nearer vision with a mirage-like effect in the 
air. It is a view that might well enchain one. The 
Spanish Peaks cut the sky far away on the horizon, and 
the beautiful range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains 
offers a view of wonderful beauty. The road passes Duf- 
fields, Summit, Rosemont, and Cathedral Park, at each 
of which stations a house or two, or a few tents, may be 
seen, — the homes of workmen or of summer dwellers who 
find the most romantic and picturesque corners of the 
universe none too good in which to set up their house- 
hold gods for the midsummer days. Nothing is more 
feasible than to live high up in the mountains along the 
" Short Line." The two trains a day bring the mails ; 
all marketing and merchandise are easily procured ; and 
the air, the views, the marvellous spectacle of sunrise and 
sunset, the perpetually changing panorama, simply make 
life a high festival. The little station of Rosemont is 
a natural park, surrounded by three towering peaks, — 
Mount Rosa, Big Chief, and San Luis. Clyde is a 
point much frequented by picnickers. The "Cathedral 
Park " is an impressive example of what the forces of 
nature can accomplish. Colossal rocks, chiselled by ero- 
sion, twisted by tempests, worn by the storms of innu- 
merable ages, loom up in all conceivable shapes. They 
are of the same order as some of the wonderful groups of 



f 



t: - 




THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 75 

rocks seen in the Grand Canon. Towers and arches and 
temples and shafts have been created by Nature's irresist- 
able forces, and to the strange fantastic form is added 
color, — the same rich and varied hues that render the 
Grand Canon so wonderful in its color effects. This 
" Cathedral Park " is a great pleasure resort for celebra- 
tions and picnics, both from Colorado Springs, Colorado 
City, Broadmoor, and other places from below, and also 
from Cripple Creek, Victor, and other towns in Cripple 
Creek District. 

The district of Cripple Creek includes a number of 
towns, — Victor, Anaconda, Eclipse, Santa Rita, Gold- 
field, Independence, and others, each centred about famous 
and productive mines. The first discovery of gold here 
was made in 1891 by a ranchman, Mr. Womack, who 
took the specimens of gold ore that he found to some 
scientific men in Colorado Springs, who pronounced it 
the genuine thing, and capitalists became interested to 
develop the mines. In 1891, the first year, the total 
value of the gold produced was $200,000 ; 1905, the four- 
teenth year, the value of the production was 847,630,107. 
The total value of the gold produced in the fourteen 
years of the camp's existence, to December 31, 1905, was 
$141,395,087. 

There are about three hundred properties in the camp 
which produce with more or less regularity. Of this num- 
ber the greatest proportion are spasmodic shippers, mak- 



76 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

ing their production from the efforts of leasers. There are 
thirty large mines in the district, each producing $100,000 
or more annually. Dividends paid by the mining compa- 
nies in 1905 amounted to $1,707,000. Total dividends 
paid to December 31, 1905, $32,742,000. There are em- 
ployed on an average some six thousand three hundred 
men in the mines, and the monthly pay-roll runs to about 
$652,189, exclusive of large salaries paid mine superin- 
tendents and managers and clerks in offices. The lowest 
wage paid in the camp is three dollars per day of eight 
hours, while many of the miners receive more than that. 
The average wage per day paid for labor amounts to 
$3.44. There are twelve towns in the district, with a 
population of fifty thousand people. During the period 
of excitement the population was about seventy thou- 
sand. The social life of the people is much the same as 
in other towns. 

There is a free school system, with an enrolment of 
nearly four thousand pupils, with a hundred and eighteen 
teachers under a superintendent with an assistant. There 
are thirty-four churches, representing almost every variety 
of faith. 

Cripple Creek, the largest of these, lies in a hollow of 
the mountains, whose surrounding ranges are a thousand 
feet above the town. It consists mostly of one long 
street, with minor cross-streets, and there are little shops 
with chiffons, "smart" ribbons and laces, and all sorts 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 77 

of articles of dress making gay the show windows, and 
one sees women and children in all their pretty and 
stylish summer attire. There are two daily papers and an 
" opera house.' 1 Cripple Creek is a rather favorite point 
with dramatic companies, as the entire town, the entire 
district, turns out, and the audiences do not lack in either 
enthusiasm or numbers. 

Mr. William Caruthers, the district superintendent, 
estimates that this region has become one of the greatest 
gold-producing regions in the world ; and in rapid devel- 
opment, and in the richness of its ores, nothing like it has 
ever been known before. In fifteen years the cattle ranges 
have been transformed into a populous district with fifty 
thousand people, and with all the modern conveniences of 
Eastern city. 

The electric trolley system connects all the towns in 
Cripple Creek district and passes near all the large mines. 
This trolley line is owned and controlled by the " Short 
Line," and is greatly sought for pleasure excursions both 
by visitors and residents. 

Electric cars convey the miners up and down the hills to 
their respective mines. The class of laborers is said to be 
greatly improved of late years, and Mr. Caruthers informs 
the questioner that no problematic characters are longer 
tolerated in Cripple Creek. It has ceased to be the para- 
dise of those who, for various unspecified personal reasons, 
were unable to keep their residence in other cities, or had 



78 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

left their own particular country for their country's good. 
When such characters appear, Mr. Caruthers and his staff 
guide them with unerring certainty to the railroad track, 
with the assurance that these intruders are wanted in 
Colorado Springs, and that, although there may be no 
parlor-car train, with all luxuries warranted, leaving at 
that moment for their migrating convenience, yet the steel 
track is before them, and it leads directly to Pike's Peak 
Avenue (the leading business street of Colorado Springs), 
and they are advised at once to fare forth on this mountain 
thoroughfare. The persuasion given by Mr. Caruthers 
and his assistants is of such an order that it is usually 
accepted without remonstrance, and the objectionable 
specimens of humanity realize that their climb of several 
thousand feet up to the famous gold camps was by way of 
being a superfluous expenditure of energy on their part. 

The special entertainment in Cripple Creek is to make 
the electric circle tour, on electric trolley cars,- between 
Cripple Creek and Victor, going on the " low line " one 
way, and the " high line " the other. The high line is 
almost even with the summit of Pike's Peak, that looms 
up within neighborly distance, and the splendor of the 
Sangre de Cristo range adds a bewildering beauty to the 
matchless panorama. On this round trip — a trolley ride 
probably not equalled in the entire world — one gets quite 
near many of the famous mines, whose machinery offers a 
curious feature in the landscape. 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 79 

Taking the trip in the late brilliant afternoon sunshine 
along this mountain crest, offers the spectacle of an entire 
landscape all in a deep rose-pink, gleaming, in contrast 
with the dark green of the cedar forests, like a tranforma- 
tion scene on a stage. 

The tourist who regards this life as a probationary 
period, to be employed, as largely as possible, in festas 
and entertaining experiences, may add a unique one to 
his repertoire, should he be so favored by the gods ; and 
sojourning in neighborly proximity to the " Garden of the 
Gods," why should they not bestir themselves in his favor ? 
At all events, if he has contrived to invoke their interest, 
and finds himself invited by Mr. MacWatters (the courte- 
ous and vigilant General Passenger Agent of the " Short 
Line"") to make the return journey from Cripple Creek, 
down below the clouds to Colorado Springs in a hand car, 
he will enjoy an experience to be treasured forever. For 
the hand car runs down of its own accord, by the law of 
gravitation, and is provided with an air-brake to regulate 
its momentum. To complete the enchantment of condi- 
tions, — and it need not be said that in a Land of En- 
chantment conditions conform to the prevailing spirit and 
of course are enchanting, — to complete these, let it be 
a partie carree, with Mrs. MacWatters, and with Ellis 
Meredith, the well-known Colorado author, to make up 
the number ; for the keenest political writer in Colorado 
is a woman, and this woman is Ellis Meredith. It is a 



80 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

name partly real, partly a literary nom-de-plume, and which 
is the one and the other need not be chronicled here. The 
name of Ellis Meredith has flown widely on the wings of 
fame as the author of a most interesting story, "The 
Master-Knot of Human Fate," which made an unusual 
impression on critical readers. " The Master-Knot " is 
an imaginative romance, whose scene is laid on one of 
the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. It presupposes 
an extraordinary if not an impossible situation, and on 
this builds up a story, brilliant, thoughtful, tantalizing 
in its undercurrent of suggestive interest, and altogether 
unique. 

In her connection with a leading Denver journal Miss 
Meredith wields a trenchant pen, and one reading these 
strong and able articles could hardly realize that the 
same writer is the author of poems, — delicate, exquis- 
ite, tender, — and of prose romance which is increas- 
ingly sought by all lovers of the art of fiction. With 
such a party of friends as these, what words can interpret 
the necromancy of this sunset journey winding down the 
heights of majestic mountains, amid a forest of towering 
peaks, and colossal rocks looming up like giant spectres 
through the early twilight that gathers when the sun 
sinks behind some lofty pinnacle ! The rose of afterglow 
burned in the east, reflecting its color over the Cheyenne 
canons, and even changing the granite precipice of the 
" Devil's Slide " — a thousand feet of precipitous rock, 




THE DEVIL S SLIDE, CKII'PI.K CREEK SHOUT LINK 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 81 

through which the steel track is cut — with a reflection 
of its rose and amber. Cathedral Park took on a new 
majesty in the deepening haze. At the foot of one of its 
tall spires is an ice cavern, which holds its perpetual supply 
all summer. The solid roadbed, uniformly ballasted with 
disintegrated granite, built on solid rock for its entire 
extent, and totally devoid of dust, gives to the hand car 
the ease and smoothness of a motor on level ground. No 
one can wonder that this road, built originally to convey 
coal and other supplies to Cripple Creek, and to bring 
the ore from the mines to the mills and smelters (a trans- 
portation it serves daily), has also, by its phenomenal 
fascinations, achieved a great passenger traffic made up of 
the tourists and visitors to Colorado. Even travellers 
going through to the Pacific Coast make the detour from 
La Junta to Colorado Springs to enjoy the " Short Line," 
just as they go from Williams to Bright Angel Trail for the 
Grand Canon. With this aerial journey through a sunset 
fairyland, where the mysterious canons and gorges lay in 
shadow and the Colorado sunshine painted pinnacles and 
towers in liquid gold, what wonder that our poet, discov- 
ering her lyre, offered the following " Ode " to the " Short 
Line " : 

" There 's the splendor that was Grecian ; 
There 's the glory that was Rome ; 
But we know a brighter splendor, 
And we find it here at home. 
6 



82 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Not the Alps or Himalayas, 

Not old Neptune's foaming brine, 

Can surpass the wealth of beauty 
Of this state of yours and mine. 

" All the fairy-tales and legends 

Of the time that 's passed away ; 
All the scientific wonders 

That amaze the world to-day ; 
All the artist can imagine, 

All the engineer design, 
Are excelled in magic beauty 

On the Cripple Creek Short Line. 

" Oh, those mountains pierce the heavens 

Till its radiance glistens through, 
And the clouds in golden glory 

Float across its field of blue ; 
And the soul that may be weary 

Feels the harmony divine 
Of this wonder-tour of Nature 

On the Cripple Creek Short Line. 

" There are minarets and towers ; 

There are stately domes and fair ; 
There are lordly, snow-capped mountains, 

There are lovely valleys there ; 
And no ancient moated castle, 

Frowning down upon the Rhine, 
Looks on scenes of greater beauty 

Than the Cripple Creek Short Line. 

" There 's a vision and a grandeur 

When the plains come into view, 
And one seems to see the ocean 
In the misty rim of blue ; 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 83 

And the eyes of landlocked sailors 
With unbidden teardrops shine, 
As they see the far-off billows 

From the Cripple Creek Short Line. 

" There 's a strength and there 's a refuge 
In the everlasting hills ; 
There 's a gleam of joy and gladness 

In the leaping sparkling rills ; 
There 's a benediction sweeter 

Than the murmur of the pine, 
And it falls on all who travel 

O'er the Cripple Creek Short Line." 

Ellis Meredith has often pictured in song the charm 
and romance of Colorado with the vividness and power 
that characterize her poems which are essentially those of 
insight and imagination ; but in the opinion of many 
of her admirers she has hardly laid at the shrine of 
the muses any more felicitous votive offering than this 
little impromptu. 

A summer in Colorado Springs is one that is set in the 
heart of fascinating attractions. Nor is the Pike's Peak 
region a summer land alone, for the autumn is even 
more beautiful, and the winters are all crystal and sun- 
shine and full of exquisite exhilaration and delight in 
mountain regions that take on new forms of interest. 
Colorado Springs is not merely — nor even mostly — an 
excursion city for pleasure-seekers ; it is a city of per- 
manent homes, whose residential advantages attract and 
create its phenomenal growth. 



84 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

To open one's eyes on the purple line of the Rocky 
Mountains, with Pike's Peak towering into the sky, in 
a luminous crystal air that makes even existence a delight, 
is an alluring experience. To look over the beautiful 
city of Colorado Springs, with its broad streets and 
boulevards, and lines of trees on either side ; its electric 
lights, electric cars, well-built brick blocks, churches, 
schools, and free public library ; its interesting and enter- 
prising journalism ; to come in contact with the in- 
telligence and refinement of the people, — is to realize 
that this is no provincial Western town, but instead, 
a gay and fashionable city, with the aspect of a summer 
watering place. Manitou, which lies six miles away 
at the very base of Pike's Peak, and Colorado Springs 
are connected by electric cars running along the mountain 
line, and there is a great social interchange. It is simply 
a whirl of social life in the late summer, and the rapidity 
with which the guest is expected to flit from one garden 
party, and tea, and reception to another, within a given 
time, reminds him of a London season. In the morning 
every fashionable woman drives to Prospect Lake, and 
from her bathing in its blue waters to the informal 
" hop" at night, she is on a perpetual round of gayety 
if she so desire. 

The wide range and freedom of life in Colorado Springs 
is equally enjoyable. The artist, the thinker, the writer, 
finds an ideal environment in which to pursue his work. 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 85 

This beautiful residence city, founded by General Palmer 
in 1871, has now a population of some thirty thousand, 
and although lying at the foot of Pike's Peak, it is yet 
on an elevation of six thousand feet above the level of 
the sea. Adjoining Colorado Springs is Colorado City, 
a manufacturing town of five thousand inhabitants, and 
Manitou, the little town at the immediate base of Pike's 
Peak, with some two thousand residents, to which, in 
the summer, is added an equal number of visitors, who 
bestow themselves in the attractive hotels and boarding- 
houses or who occupy cottages or camps in the foothills* 
Colorado Springs was founded in a wise and beneficent 
spirit. Every deed in the town contains a clause pro- 
hibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors, and by the 
terms of the contract any violation of this agreement 
renders the deed null and void and the property reverts 
to the city. Education is made compulsory, and on this 
basis of temperance, education, and morality the town 
is founded. It is laid out with generous ideas and with 
unfailing allegiance to municipal ideals of taste. The 
avenues are one hundred and forty feet wide and the 
streets are all one hundred feet wide. Lying midway 
between Denver and Pueblo, the two largest cities of 
the state, Colorado Springs is within two hours of the 
former and one hour of the latter. 

Colorado College, a co-educational institution, is largely 
endowed, and it has from eight to nine hundred students. 



86 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, D.D., of Boston, the president 
of the Unitarian Association, was invited to deliver 
the Commencement Address at this college in 1905, and 
on this occasion Dr. Eliot said : 

" Nothing can surpass the academic dignity of a commence- 
ment at a Western State University. The perfection of the 
discipline would make our elegant, but often distressed, ' mas- 
ter of ceremonies' at Harvard green with envy. At our 
Eastern Colleges there are still individual idiosyncracies and 
perverse prejudices and traditions of simpler days to be 
considered. There are some old-fashioned members of the 
faculty who just won't wear the academic gown or the appro- 
priately colored hood, and there are always some reckless 
seniors who will wear tan shoes or a straw hat. Not so in 
Kansas and Colorado, in Iowa and Nebraska. There every 
professor and every senior wears his uniform as if he were 
used to it ; each one knows his place and his part and performs 
it impressively. The academic procession, headed by the 
regents in their gowns and followed by the members of the 
various faculties with their characteristic hoods and stripes, 
and by the senior classes of the college and the various pro- 
fessional schools, is perfect in its orderly procedure, and the 
commencement exercises themselves are carried through with 
a solemnity which is sometimes awesome. I caught myself 
almost wishing that some senior would forget to take off his 
Oxford cap at the proper time or trip on his gown as he came 
up the steps of the platform to get his sheepskin, but no such 
accident marred the impressiveness of the occasion." 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 87 

Dr. Eliot playfully touches a fact in the social as well 
as in the academic life of the West in these remarks. 
The informalities so frequently experienced in recognized 
social life in the Eastern cities are seldom encountered in 
the corresponding circles of life in the West, all observ- 
ance of times and seasons, as calling hours, ceremonial 
invitations, and driving being quite strictly relegated 
to their true place in the annals of etiquette. In his 
Commencement address before Colorado College in 1905 
Dr. Eliot said, regarding the several educational schools of 
Colorado : 

" Thus in Colorado the State University is at Boulder, the 
Agricultural College at Fort Collins, the Normal School at 
Greeley, the School of Mines at Golden, and so on. The 
result is not only an injudicious diffusion of energy, but real 
waste and sometimes deplorable rivalry. Doubtless it is now 
too late to rectify this mistake. Provincial jealousies and a 
sense of local ownership are too strong to permit of desirable 
concentration, and these states are probably permanently 
burdened with the necessity of sustaining half a dozen in- 
stitutions which must often duplicate equipment and courses 
of instruction." 

Leading authorities in the Centennial State do not 
wholly agree with this view. The distribution of an 
educational centre in one city and part of the state and 
another in a different part, contributes to the building up 



88 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

of different cities and to a certain concentration on the 
part of the students on the special subjects pursued. 
President Slocum of Colorado College, President Baker of 
the State University, President Snyder of the State Nor- 
mal College in Greeley, with other college presidents and 
their colleagues and faculties, are devoting their lives to 
the interests of higher education in its broadest and most 
complete sense ; and with their own splendid equipments 
in learning, their patience and ability in research, their 
zeal for teaching, and their intense interest in the prob- 
lems of university life in a new state, they are making a 
record of the most impressive quality. They are the 
great pathfinders of the educational future. 

Colorado has the advantage of a larger percentage of 
American population than any other of the Western 
inland states, there being only twenty per cent of foreign 
admixture in the entire six hundred and fifty thousand 
people, — a fact that is especially to be considered in 
educational progress. 

The high school building in Colorado Springs ; the 
court house, costing a half-million dollars ; the new city 
library of Colorado stone ; the thirty-five miles of electric 
railway; a water system costing over a million of dol- 
lars ; the admirable telephone system, — these and the fine 
architectural art would render it a desirable residence city 
even aside from the group of scenic wonders which has 
made it famous all over the world. 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 89 

General William J. Palmer, the founder of Colorado 
Springs, is one of the great benefactors of the state of 
Colorado. "General Palmer has always been a builder 
for the future," says a local authority. " His remarkable 
foresight was best exemplified in the construction of the 
Rio Grande railroad, — the road which made Colorado 
famous. Colorado Springs is another monument to his 
prophetic vision. With an ample fortune he has retired 
from business life, but is busier than ever with his many 
philanthropies, all of which have an eye to the future. 

"At great expense he has abolished Bear Creek toll- 
gate, and has constructed a wonderful carriage road 
through this beautiful canon, and will give it to the 
people as a permanent blessing." 

This Bear Creek Canon lies north of Cheyenne Canon 
— about five miles from Colorado Springs. The road 
winds back and forth in a zigzag elevation, with new vistas 
of enchantment at every turn, — towering mountains, the 
Garden of the Gods, — that strange, weird spectacle, St. 
Peter's Dome, Phantom Falls, Silver Cascade, Helen Hunt 
Falls, and other points of romantic beauty. 

Colorado Springs has a great park system at a cost 
already of three hundred thousand dollars, and with the 
buildings and other features projected the cost will be 
hardly less than half a million. There are to be floral 
gardens, an Italian sunken basin with a fountain rising 
in streams, after the fashion of the fountains of Versailles, 



90 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

— and an art gallery is soon to be added to this lovely and 
enterprising city. Already the city has Palmer Park, — 
comprising eight hundred acres, donated by the generous 
and beneficent General Palmer, — a park that contains 
Austin's Bluffs, from which a magnificent view is obtained. 

It is to General Palmer that all the charming extension 
of terraced drives and walks in North Cheyenne Canon is 
due, — the road often terraced on the side of the moun- 
tain ; and here and there little refreshment stands, where 
a sandwich, a glass of lemonade, a cup of tea may be had, 
are found in these wild altitudes. In Palmer Park one 
portion has been appropriately named Statuary Park, from 
the multitude of strange forms and figures that Nature 
has chiselled in the sandstone. Gray's Peak, like a dim 
shadow on the far horizon to the north, and the faint, 
beautiful outline of the Spanish Peaks to the south, are 
seen from this park, while the massive portals of the 
" Garden of the Gods " in their burning red are near, 
and at one side the rose pink rocks of Blair Athol. 

General Palmer s residence in Glen Eyrie is one of the 
poetic places of the world. The romantic environment of 
mountain canons, towers, and domes of the fantastic 
sandstone shapes, and overhanging rocks that loom up 
thousands of feet on a mountain side, impart a wild charm 
that no words can picture. The architectural effects have 
been kept in artistic correspondence with the romantic 
scenery. 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 91 

Monument Valley Park is the latest of General Palmer's 
munificent gifts to Colorado Springs. It was a tract of 
low waste land some two miles in length and covering 
an area of two hundred or more acres, but its transforma- 
tion into the present beautiful park is the realization of 
an Aladdin's dream. An artistic stone drinking-foun- 
tain ; a wide vista of trees relieved by a low Italian basin 
with fountains ; Monument Creek, made to be sixty feet 
wide between its banks; the creation of artificial lakes; 
and there are included in the scheme conservatories, 
rustic pavilions, and botanical gardens. This park is one 
of the most extensive improvements in decorative effect, 
that is known in any city. 

Monument Park is distinctive from Monument Valley 
Park, the former lying some ten miles from the city, and 
it is picturesque beyond words. 

The "Garden of the Gods" has achieved world-wide 
fame. The " Gateway," the "Cathedral Spires," "Bal- 
anced Rock," and other singular formations fascinate the 
visitor and draw him back again and again. A local 
writer thus describes the majestic " Gateway " : 

"Two immense slabs of red sandstone, soft and beautiful 
in their coloring, tower over three hundred feet high on either 
side and seem to challenge the right of the stranger to enter 
the sacred portals. Napoleon, at the Pyramids, sought to im- 
press his soldiers with the thought that from that eminence 
four thousand years looked down upon them. But from here 



92 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

geological ages of untold length look down upon the be- 
holder. In close proximity may be found limestone, gypsum, 
white sandstone, and red sandstone, each representing a 
different geological era, and each, in all probability, represent- 
ing millions of years in its formation." 

The " Garden of the Gods " represents one of those 
inexplicable epochs of Nature's creations as does, only 
in a more marvellous degree, the Grand Canon and the 
Petrified Forest. A scientist says of these grotesque shapes 
that "their strangely garish colors, red and yellow and 
white, in enormous masses, lofty buttresses, towers and 
pinnacles, besides formations of lesser size, in fantastic 
shapes, that readily lend themselves to the imagination, 
are sedimentary strata, which once lay horizontally upon 
the mountain's breast, but that some gigantic convulsion 
of nature threw them into their present perpendicular 
attitude, with their roots, as it were, extending hun- 
dreds of feet underground. The erosion of water, when 
this was all the Gulf of Mexico, accounts for the 
shaping. 

"The gateway to the Garden is really the grandest 
feature, rising perpendicularly on either side twice the 
height of Niagara, and framing in rich terra cotta a most 
entrancing picture of the blue and tawny peak, apparently 
only a little way on the other side." 

Any writer on Colorado Springs is embarrassed by the 
fact that the great founder and benefactor of the city 




GATEWAY OF THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, 
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO 




CATHEDRAL SPIRES, GARDEN OF THE GODS, 

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO 



THE REGION OF PIKE'S PEAK 93 

has requested that his name is not to be recorded in con- 
nection with his great and constant gifts to the munici- 
pality ; and while it is far from the desire of any one to 
disregard the expressed wish of a man whose modesty 
is as great as is his munificent generosity, it is yet im- 
possible to tell the story of Colorado Springs without 
perpetual references to her distinguished citizen, her great 
and noble benefactor and founder. It is not too much 
to say that there is probably not, in the history of the 
United States, an instance parallel to the story of General 
Palmer and Colorado Springs. Yet beyond this bare 
mention, in which one even thus records that which 
General Palmer has wished to have had left without 
reference, one is under bonds not to go. The Recording 
Angel may not be so plastic to the expressed preferences 
of the wise founder and the munificent benefactor of the 
charming city ; and the vast and generous gifts, the noble 
character of the citizen whose life and example is the most 
priceless legacy that he could bequeath to Colorado 
Springs, however priceless are his long series of gifts, — 
these are inevitably inscribed in that eternal record not 
made with hands, on whose pages must ever remain, 
in shining letters, the honored name of General William J. 
Palmer, whose energy and whose lofty spirit have invested 
this beautiful centre of the picturesque region of Pike's 
Peak with the spell of an enchanted city lying fair in a 
Land of Enchantment. 



94 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 



CHAPTER IV 

SUMMER WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 

" God only knows how Saadi dined; 
Moses he ate and drank the wind. " 

Emerson 

Deep in the heart of the Rocky Mountains lies Glenwood 
Springs, a fashionable watering place, where a great hotel, 
bearing the name of the Centennial State, with every pretty 
decorative device imaginable, allures the summer idlers, and 
where various kinds of springs and baths furnish excuse for 
occupation. All varieties of invalidism, real or fancied, 
meet their appropriate cure. One lady declared that the 
especial elixir of life was found in a hot cave that yawns 
its cavernous and mysterious depths in an adjacent moun- 
tain. Another continued to thrive on (or in) the spar- 
kling waters of " the pool," which is, for the most part, a 
dream of fair women, relay after relay, all day and even- 
ing, swimming about after the fashion of the Rhine sisters ; 
and those who do not take kindly to the pool or the dark 
and " hot " cave fall upon some particular geyser and ap- 
propriate it for their own. Woe to the woman who in- 
terferes with another woman's geyser! The whole region 
around Glenwood Springs is phenomenal. A hot sulphur 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 95 

spring boils up at the rate of twenty thousand gallons a 
minute. The "pool 11 — where the Rhine maidens are for- 
ever floating, morning, noon, and night — covers over an 
acre, and is from three to six or seven feet deep. Two 
currents of water are constantly pouring into it, — the hot 
(at one hundred and twenty-seven degrees) at a rate of ten 
thousand gallons a minute, and the cold from a mountain 
stream. A stream constantly runs from it, a part of which 
is utilized as a waterfall in the centre of the large dining- 
room of the hotel. On one bank of this pool is a colossal 
stone bathhouse (costing over one hundred thousand dol- 
lars), where every conceivable variety of the bath is admin- 
istered, and from which " the pool " is entered. In warm 
evenings, when the full midsummer moon peeps over the 
mountains, the groups of girls, one after another, begin 
mysteriously to disappear, and in reply to a question as 
to the destination of this evening pilgrimage one bewitch- 
ing creature in floating blue organdie, as she flitted past, 
laughingly answered, " Come to the pool and see. 11 There 
was no time to be lost. The moon in silver splendor was 
climbing over the mountains, and the girls emerged from 
their dainty evening gowns to array themselves in bath- 
ing suits. A few minutes later they were to be seen 
at this mysterious try sting place at "the pool, 11 the only 
difference being that some were outside and some inside. 
Surely those inside had the best of it. How can the 
scene be pictured ? From the broad piazza of the hotel 



96 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

a terraced walk ran down through the greenest of lawns, 
with shade trees and a fountain resplendent in colored 
electric lights. The pool lies in an open glade. Not 
far away is one of the ranges of the Rocky Mountains, 
over which the August moon was climbing. Tall electric 
lights mingled with the moonlight, giving the most curious 
effects of chiaroscuro through the glade and the defiles 
of the mountains. On one side of this immense natato- 
rium rose the vast stone bathhouse, — a beautiful piece of 
architecture. Near by the round sulphur spring boiled and 
bubbled in a way to suggest the witches' rhyme : 

" Double, double toil and trouble ; 
. Fire, burn ; and, cauldron, bubble." 

A high toboggan slide in one place descended into the 
pool, and was much used by the young athletes, — the men, 
not the girls. In the pool a natural fountain of cold water 
shot high in the air. The swimmers abounded. Those 
who were unable to swim would cling to a floating ladder. 
Here in the moonlight the girls — clinging two and three 
together — circle around in the water, needing only the 
melody of the Rhine sisters to complete the illusion of 
one of the most enchanting scenes in the entire Wagner 
operas. 

Rev. Frederick Campbell wrote of this unique place : 

" There is but one word to utter at Glen wood Springs — 
e Wonderful ! ' If one enjoys life at the most luxurious of 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 97 

hotels, here it is at Hotel Colorado. Built in the Italian 
style of peach-blow sandstone and light brick, lighted with 
electricity, a searchlight reaching from one of its towers at 
night and lighting the train up the valley, a powerful foun- 
tain supplied from the mountain stream up the canon pour- 
ing the geyser 170 feet straight in the air, and views, views 
everywhere." 

The hot cave is as wonderful as anything around Sorrento 
or Amalfi. In fact, all Colorado reminds the traveller of 
Italian scenery. It has been called the Switzerland of 
America, but it is far more the Italy. It has the Italian 
sky, the Italian coloring, and the mysterious and inde- 
finable enchantment of that land of romance and dream. 
The volcanic phenomena is often startlingly similar to 
that of Italy. This hot cave at Glenwood Springs is of 
the same order as those on Capri and the adjacent coasts 
of Italy. In this cave at Glenwood hot air continually 
comes up from some unknown region, and it is utilized for 
curative purposes. The two or three caves have been 
made into one, a cement floor laid, and marble seats with 
marble backs put in (the ancient Romans would have 
found this a Paradise). Here come — not the halt or 
the blind, but the people who take "the cure." The 
process is to sit on the marble seat with a linen bag drawn 
completely over the entire form, with a hole for the head 
to emerge. Around the neck is placed a towel wrung out 
of cold water. To see a cave filled with these modern 



98 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

mummies, sitting solemnly, done up in their linen cases, 
like upholstery covering, is a spectacle. The men go in the 
morning, the women in the afternoon. One lady oblig- 
ingly gave the data of her " cure." Twice a week she mi- 
grated in negligee to the hot cave, and sat done up in her 
linen covering, bathing in the hot air at one hundred and 
twenty degrees or so. Other afternoons were devoted to 
the hot sulphur water bathing, and what with the various 
gradations of temperature and the work of the attend- 
ants, the cup of Turkish coffee and the siesta, the process 
consumed the entire afternoon. It is bliss to those who 
delight in being rolled up like a mummy and sitting still. 
But if it were chasing a star that danced, if it were riding 
on a moonbeam, if it were dancing with the daffodils, — if 
it were anything in all the world that was motion, — then 
it might have some fairer title to charm. The felicity of 
lying about in a state of inertia is in the nature of a mys- 
tery. And one questions, too, whether the spring of life 
is not, after all, within rather than without. Let one 
take care of his mental life and the physical will, very 
largely at least, keep in spring and tune without elabo- 
rate and expensive processes of propping it up. To 
disport one's self in the pool, — there is a delight. Who 
would n't be a Rhine maiden under the midsummer moon 
in the heart of the Rocky Mountains ? 

In nearly all the canons and caves of this surrounding 
region are found tracesof the prehistoric peoples who 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 99 

inhabited them. Fragments of pottery, in artistic design 
and painted in bright colors, are numerous ; relics similar 
to those found in the cliff houses are not unfrequently 
chanced upon in walks and excursions and the stone im- 
plements abound. The ethnologist finds a great field for 
research in all this Glenwood Springs country. There are 
carriage roads terraced along the base of the mountains 
where drives from five to twenty miles can be enjoyed in 
the deep ravines where only a glimpse of blue sky is seen 
above, and the saunterer finds a new walk every day. The 
mountains branch off in every direction, and the lofty 
peaks silhouette themselves against the sky. It is like being 
whirled up into the air. The sensation is exhilarating be- 
yond words. If people could take " cures " getting up into 
sublime altitudes like this, where the views are so heavenly 
that one does not know where earth ends and Paradise 
begins, — that would be a cure worth the name. Really, 
it is vitality and exhilaration that one wants, and it is to 
be found in the air far more than in any other element. 

" 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant ; 
'T is life, not death, for which we pant, 
More life and fuller that I want." 

The Denver and Rio Grande Railway is well called 
" the scenic line of the world." From Denver to Pueblo 
it runs almost due south, across a level valley, with per- 
petually enchanting views of the mountains and curious 
rock formations, between Denver to the region below 

LOFC. 



100 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Colorado Springs. From the great smelting city of 
Pueblo, " the Pittsburg of the West, 1 ' the road turns west- 
ward, on an upward grade, till it reaches Canon City, and 
from there to Glenwood Springs this road is a marvel of 
civil engineering. Up the narrow, deep canons of Grand 
River, through the towering granite cliffs, it winds, on and 
up, passing Holy Cross Mountain, offering at every turn 
new vistas of sublime and wonderful beauty. To take 
a day's ride through such scenery, with the luxurious com- 
fort of the most modern Pullman cars, and a good dining- 
car constantly with the train, is to enjoy a day that lives 
in memory. Not the least of the attractions of Glenwood 
Springs is the enchanting route by means of which one 
arrives in this picturesque region. As the train climbs up 
to plateau after plateau in the mountains the scenes are 
full of changeful enchantment. The formation is interest- 
ing, — a deep canon, with rock cliffs apparently tower- 
ing into the sky, and then the emerging on a great level 
plateau. All along this route, too, are those wonderful 
sandstone formations that have made the " Garden of the 
Gods " so marvellous a place. Between Canon City and 
Glenwood Springs the very dance of the Brocken is seen 
in Sandstone sculptures. 

Near the summit of Iron Mountain, which is in the 
immediate vicinity, the " Fairy Caves " rival the famous 
" Blue Grotto " of Capri in attraction. These caves 
(less than a mile from the Hotel Colorado) are a most 




- 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 101 

intricate and wonderful series of subterranean caverns, 
grottos, and labyrinths, with translucent stalactites and 
stalagmites, and they are all lighted by electricity, — a 
great improvement on the sibyls 1 cave, where the sibylline 
leaves were read. The oracles of that time were sadly 
lacking in conditions of modern conveniences. The sibyl 
had not even a telephone. We do things better now, and 
run electric cars up to the Pyramids. Nor did the sibyl of 
old have a tunnel two hundred feet long, by which her 
votaries could approach the scene of her oracles ; but 
visitors to the Fairy Caves may pass by means of this 
tunnel to one of the grandest and most awful precipices 
in the Rocky Mountains, where they step out upon a 
balcony of stone into the open air, with a perpendicular 
wall of rock one hundred feet high, above, and an almost 
perpendicular abyss, down, twelve hundred feet below. 
Standing on this balcony, nothing can be seen behind 
but sheer perpendicular ascent and descent of rock ; but 
in front and far below may be seen the Grand River, 
appearing as a brook, winding in and out among the 
projecting mountains, visible here like burnished silver, 
and lost there, only to reappear again at a point far 
distant. 

At this high elevation the opening of the canon of the 
Grand is seen in all of its majesty, — the massive moun- 
tains projecting against each other in their outlines, and 
the lofty peaks reaching to the skies. The Denver and 



102 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Rio Grande Railway is at the foot of the canon, — a mere 
winding line, as seen from this Titanic height. 

The Colorado Midland Road also runs through Glen- 
wood Springs, whose phenomenal hot caves and luxu- 
rious and elaborate bathhouse have given it European 
fame. The twin towers of the hotel remind one of 
Notre Dame, and the views from these are beautiful. 
The design is after the Villa Medici in Rome, — the 
same motive repeated for the central motive of this 
superb Hotel Colorado with its towers and Italian 
loggias and splendid spacious piazzas, and its search- 
light from one of the towers, illuminating the evening 
trains that pass in the deep canon of Grand River. 
Here is a region that might be that of Sorrento and 
Capri. 

In Glenwood Springs the traveller may meet Mrs. 
Emma Homan Thayer, the author of " Wild Flowers 
in Colorado,' 1 published in both London and New York. 
Mrs. Thayer was a New York girl, one of the original 
founders of the Art League, and the daughter of an 
enterprising and well-known man. She is an artist by 
nature and grace, — sketches, paints, and writes, and 
in both painting and literature she has made a name that 
is recognized, and she has charmingly perpetuated in 
her book the unique and wonderful procession of 
Colorado wild flowers. 

Lookout Mountain, rising some twenty-five hundred 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 103 

feet above the town, has an easy trail to its summit ; the 
driving is picturesque and safe on terraced mountain 
roads with perpetual vistas of beauty, and many lakes 
in the vicinity — Mountain, Big Fish, Trappers 1 Lake, and 
others — offer excellent fishing. The hotel grounds at 
night are transformed into a veritable fairyland. The 
fountains shoot their jets of water up hundreds of feet 
into the air, with a play of color from electric lights 
thrown over them until they are all a changeful irides- 
cent dream of rose and emerald and gold mingled with 
blue, — the very rainbows of heaven reproduced in mid- 
air. 

The journey up the " scenic route " has one point 
especially — that at the base of the Holy Cross Moun- 
tain where the train climbs from plateau to plateau — 
that enchants the imagination. The vast mysterious 
canons lie far below, steeped in the twilight of the gods. 
The air shimmers with faint hints of color. Above, the 
towering granite walls seem to cut their way into the sky. 
The faint plash of a thousand waterfalls echoes from the 
rocky precipices, and the faint call of some lonely bird 
hovering over a pinnacle is heard. The mysterious light, 
the dim coolness and fragrance, the glimpses of blue 
sky seen through the narrow openings of the canons 
above all, combine to produce that enchantment — the 
" Encantada," — that Vasquez de Coronado felt when 
he first beheld this marvellous country. 



104 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Emerson asserts that life is a search after power, — 
" Merlin's blows are strokes of fate." 

It is apparently a twentieth-century Merlin who has 
dreamed a dream of wresting electricity from the moun- 
tain currents to utilize as power to create a new field for 
industrial energy. The electrical engineer, who is the 
magician of contemporary life, demonstrates that not the 
volume of a stream, but rather its " fall," is the measure of 
its possibilities of power, and no country is so rich in water 
that comes tumbling down from the heights as is Colo- 
rado. The wild streams that precipitate themselves down 
the mountain-sides are as valuable as are the veins of 
gold that permeate the mountain. Science has now taken 
them in hand, and will not longer permit these torrents 
and waterfalls to run to waste or to display themselves ex- 
clusively as decorative features of the mountain landscapes. 
The General Electric Company is utilizing these falling 
waters, and is already achieving results with their trans- 
formation into power which are beyond the dreams of 
imagination. The Silver Cascade, which for ages has had 
nothing to do but leap and flash under the shimmering 
gold of the Colorado sunshine, suddenly undergoes 

" a sea change 
Into something new and strange. " 

It becomes an important factor in the world's work. For 
instance, in lovelv Manitou, — the little town that dreams 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 105 

at the foot of Pike's Peak and which seems made only for 
stars and sunsets and as the stage setting of idyllic experi- 
ences, — in lovely Manitou an hydro-electric plant has 
been for more than a year in successful operation ; and an 
opportunity is thereby afforded the interested observer to 
see the practical working of an enterprise that draws its 
energy directly from nature's sources. The power is ob- 
tained from water that is stored in a reservoir situated far 
up on the side of the peak. Three and one-half miles of 
pipe were used to carry the water from the reservoir to the 
plant. The water has a fall of twenty-three hundred feet, 
which is much more than is needed to turn the giant 
wheels that furnish the power to be distributed to Colo- 
rado Springs, Colorado City, and the surrounding country. 
The mills at Colorado City use this power exclusively, 
and the cheapness at which it can be furnished is a potent 
factor in making for the success of their operation. 

At Durango the Animas Power and Water Company 
has installed a plant for hydro-electric energy which will 
furnish power to the entire San Juan county. The plant 
comprises two three-thousand horse-power current genera- 
tors and the station appliances that correspond with these ; 
and from this plant extend fifty-thousand volt circuits to all 
the large mines near Ouray, Silverton, and Telluride. The 
"Camp Bird," the "Gold King," the "Silver Lake," the 
" Gold Prince," and the " Revenue Tunnel " mines all draw 
from this plant for their entire milling and mining work. 



106 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

To harness the cascades, which for ages have known 
no sterner duty than to sparkle and frolic in the sunshine, 
to force the water sprites and nixies to perform the work 
of thousands of horse-power, is the achievement of the 
modern Merlin. 

The Platte River Power and Irrigation Company are 
about to establish two electrical power enterprises most 
important to Denver, one of which is to supply all the 
power that is necessary to turn every wheel now in motion 
in the city, and the second is to secure electric power from 
the water that is stored in the Cheesman dam and transmit 
it to Denver. Responsible men are working for the success 
of the enterprises, and it is anticipated that Denver will 
soon enjoy the advantage of power furnished at a minimum 
of cost. 

The Denver inter-urban service for transportation will 
be carried on entirely by electricity within the near future. 
All the railroads that centre in this City Beautiful are 
preparing estimates and making ready to conduct experi- 
ments. The recent tests in the East of electrically driven 
locomotives indicate that Colorado, with Denver as a 
centre, will one day be a network of electric lines travers- 
ing productive regions and connecting all the prosperous 
towns of the state by this most ideal form of transit. 

In Colorado it is one of the unwritten laws — a law 
from which there is no appeal — that nothing which is 
desirable is impossible. This is one of the spiritual laws, 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 107 

indeed, and he who holds it as an axiom shall perpetually 
reaHze its force and its eternal truth. The entire physical 
world is plastic to the world of spirit. In that realm 
alone realities exist. For " the things which are seen are 
temporal ; but the things which are not seen are eternal." 
The faith that stands — not " in the wisdom of man, 
but in the power of God " — is that which shall be justi- 
fied by the most profound actuality. It is that hidden 
wisdom " which God ordained before the world unto our 
glory." Science has already discerned the connection be- 
tween organic form and super-space ; and speculations 
already begin to emerge from the dim and vague region of 
conjecture into hypothesis and theory out of which are 
developed new working laws of the universe which are as 
undeniable as is that of the law of gravitation. 

In harmonious accordance, then, with that unwritten 
law of Colorado that nothing which is desirable is impos- 
sible, it was realized that the Gunnison River, a powerful 
stream thirty miles east of the Uncompahgre, afforded an 
abundance of water to reclaim these desert wastes to the 
traditional blossoming of the rose. The Gunnison River, 
however, flows through a box canon three thousand feet 
deep. Were it at the bottom of a gorge three thousand 
miles deep, that fact would hardly daunt the Colorado spirit. 
Immediately some invention, incomprehensible to the pres- 
ent mind of man, would be made by which the desirable issue 
should be achieved. As has been remarked, failure is a 



108 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

word not included in the vocabulary of Colorado. That 
state has a " revised version " of its own for the resources 
of its language, laws, and literature. Its keynote is the 
invincible. Ways and means are mere matters of minor 
detail. If an achievement is desirable, it is to be accom- 
plished, of course. It is not even a question for discussion. 
There is no margin of debatable land in the realization of 
every conceivable opportunity. 

A stupendous work in development is that of this Gun- 
nison Tunnel under the Vernal Mesa to Uncompahgre 
Valley, — a desert waste whose area comprises some one 
hundred thousand acres of sand, sagebrush, and stones. 
Yet even here irrigation worked its spell, and while the 
Uncompahgre River held out a water supply, the land 
reached proved fertile beyond expectation. But the 
Uncompahgre had its far too definite and restricted limits ; 
no other water supply was available for this region, and 
there lay the land — a tract of potential wealth, but 
destined to remain, so far as could be seen, an unpro- 
ductive and cumbersome desert region unless irrigation 
could be achieved. 

To the constructing engineer of the reclamation service 
there came a telegram from the chief engineer in Wash- 
ington asking if it were feasible to divert the waters of 
Gunnison River to Uncompahgre Valley by means of 
a tunnel under Vernal Mesa? This implied building a 
tunnel from a point totally unknown. No one had ever 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 109 

succeeded in passing through Gunnison Canon. But the 
past tense does "not count," any more than Rip Van 
Winkle's last glass, in any estimate of the present in 
Colorado. Professor Fellows, an engineer of Denver, 
selected his assistant; they prepared their instruments, 
their provisions, and their inflated rubber mattress, and 
set forth on this expedition in which their lives were in 
constant peril ; in which hardships beyond description 
were endured. The topographic map, for instance, was 
made by Mr. Fellows in the delightful position of being 
lowered with ropes into the deep canon where, should the 
slightest accident occur, he would never return to the day 
and daylight world again. The establishment of precise 
levels for both ends of the tunnel, one of which must, of 
course, be lower than the other to induce a flow of water, 
was another matter requiring a delicacy of adjustment 
beyond description. Of their wonderful and even tragic 
experiences a local report says : " It all ended by Fellows 
-and his companion saving two things, — their lives and 
their notebooks. Everything else went down with the 
flood. When the men emerged at the Devil's Slide, weary, 
bruised, and bleeding, friends who had been waiting to pick 
up their mangled bodies hailed them as if they had re- 
turned from the dead." 

Of all this story there was no hint in the cheerfully 
laconic telegram despatched to Washington, — " Complete 
surveys for construction." The tunnel will be five or six 



110 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

miles in length, of which over two miles are already com- 
pleted. The work proceeds night and day with the drills 
like mighty giants eating their way through the solid granite 
of the Vernal Mesa that lies between the two rivers. This 
desert region which will thus be reclaimed comprises por- 
tions of three counties, — Ouray, Montrose, and Delta, — the 
region being at an altitude of five thousand feet. It easily 
produces fruit, alfalfa, and grain, and it is also well adapted 
to the culture of potatoes, celery, and the sugar beet. The 
land when irrigated is estimated to be worth five hundred 
dollars per acre. The tunnel will have a capacity for con- 
veying thirteen thousand cubic feet of water per second, 
and there will be connected with it an elaborate system of 
lesser canals and ditches that will carry the water all over 
this desert tract. It is estimated that this enterprise will 
add thousands of homes to the valley of the Uncompahgre, 
and that it will increase by at least ten millions the taxa- 
ble property of Colorado. The cost of the Gunnison 
Tunnel will be some two and a half millions. 

Uncompahgre Valley, lying between the Continental 
Divide on the east, and the Utah Desert on the west, 
comprises the greatest extent of irrigable land west of 
Pueblo in the entire state ; but the need for irrigation 
and the possibilities of supplying that need were so widely 
apart that even Merlin the Enchanter recognized the 
difficulty, though by no means defining it as an impossi- 
bility. The Uncompahgre River was soon exhausted, and 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 111 

only this apparently impracticable scheme, now happily 
realized, offered any solution of the problem. Hon. Meade 
Hammond of the state legislature of Colorado secured the 
appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars to meet the 
expenses of surveying and preliminary work. Hon. John 
C. Bell, the representative for that district in Congress, 
gave untiring devotion to the project, and to his efforts 
was due the zeal with which the reclamation service took 
up this vast work ; and when Professor Fellows was ap- 
pointed as the government district engineer its success 
became the object of his supreme interest and unremit- 
ting energy, and its achievement adds another to the 
remarkable engineering works of Colorado. 

In this Land of Enchantment almost anything is possi- 
ble, even to yachting, — a pastime that would not at first 
present itself as one to be included among the entertain- 
ments of an arid state which has to set its own legislative 
machinery and that of Congress in motion in order to 
contrive a water supply for even its agricultural service ; 
nevertheless, on a lake in the mountains, more than a mile 
and a half above sea level and some one hundred miles from 
Denver the Beautiful, a yacht club disports itself with all 
the airy grace and assurance of its ground — one means of 
its water — that distinguishes the delightful Yacht Club 
at old Marblehead on the Atlantic Coast. There was, 
however, no government appropriation made to create this 
lake, as might at first be supposed, nor any experts sent out 



112 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

commissioned to prepare the way. There are numerous 
forms of summer-day entertainments that are more or less 
in evidence in the inland states ; but yachting has never 
been supposed to be among them, as preconceived ideas of 
this joy have invariably associated it with oceans and seas. 
Still, it must be remembered that Colorado is an excep- 
tional region in the universe, and creates, not follows, 
precedents. It is the state, as has before been remarked, to 
which nothing conceivable is impossible. 

Grand Lake is in Middle Park, sixty miles from the 
nearest railroad station. (With the incredible celerity 
with which life progresses in the Centennial State, of 
course by the time this description is materialized in 
print Grand Lake may have become a railroad centre — 
who shall say ? It is not safe to limit prophecy in Colo- 
rado.) At present, however, a railroad journey of forty 
miles from Denver, supplemented by sixty miles of stage, 
brings one to the lake, a beautiful sheet of water two 
miles in length and more than a mile in width, whose 
water is icy cold. The locality has become something of 
a summer resort for many Denver people, and also, to some 
extent, to those from Chicago and Kansas City, and a 
group of cottages have sprung up. Some seven years ago 
the Grand Lake Yacht Club was duly organized, with Mr. 
R. C. Campbell, a son-in-law of Senator Patterson of Col- 
orado, Mr. W. H. Bryant, a prominent citizen of Denver 
the Beautiful, Major Lafayette Campbell, and other well- 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 113 

known men, as its officers. The club has now a fleet of 
yachts ; it has its regatta week, and altogether holds its 
own among nautical associations ; it takes itself seriously, 
in fact with what Henry James calls the " deadly earnest- 
ness of the Bostonians," which is paralleled by this inland 
and arid-land yachting club. 

Besides the joys of yachting in an arid state where that 
nautical pastime is apparently carried on in mid air, is the 
local diversion of climbing mountain peaks that are pro- 
nounced impossible of ascension. This is one of the favorite 
entertainments of Colorado young women, who have con- 
quered Long's, Gray's, Pike's, and Torrey's peaks, Mount 
Massive, the " Devil's Causeway," and various lesser heights, 
which they scale with the characteristically invincible energy 
of their state. The summit of Mount Massive is fourteen 
thousand five hundred feet above sea level, and of one of 
these expeditions a Denver journal says of this party of 
several ladies and gentlemen : 

" Camp was struck at Lamb's ranch, where, in the early 
morning, the wagon was left with all the outfit not absolutely 
necessary. The trail sloped steadily to the boulder field, 
where the party stopped for lunch. They were now at an 
altitude of twelve thousand feet. A cold wind swept across 
the range and chilled them, so that the climb was soon 
renewed. 

u The boulder field is two miles long and seemed five, for 

walking over the great stones is a wearisome business. At the 

8 



114 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

end of the boulder field, which is much like the terminal 
range of an old glacier, is a great snowbank. From a long 
distance the mountain climbers saw the keyhole, — a deep 
notch of overjutting rock through which goes the only trail 
to the summit of Long's. It is a gigantic cornice to a ridge 
that extends north from the main cone. 

" After passing the keyhole, which had loomed up before 
them through weary miles of tramping, a great panorama of 
mountains stretched before them. . . . There was a precipi- 
tous slope of rocks jammed together in a gulch. This rises 
for about seven hundred feet, every inch stiff climbing. 

"The danger at this point was that some climbers might 
dislodge rocks which would come bounding down on the 
heads of those in the rear. For this reason the orders of the 
leader were urgent that the party should not get separated. 
The trail at this point led up the sharply sloping eaves of the 
mountain roof, from which the climber might drop a dizzy 
distance to the depths below. Clinging to the rocks and 
hanging on by hands or feet, the party pushed up to a ledge 
from which they looked over an abyss several thousand feet 
sheer down." 

In Southern Colorado the cliff-dwellers' region offers 
some of the most remarkable ruins in America, and their 
preservation in a government reservation, to be known as 
the Mesa Verde National Park, has been assured by a bill 
that has been recently passed by Congress and which is 
one of the eminent features of latter-day legislation. It 
is Representative Hogg who introduced this bill providing 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 115 

for the permanent protection of those cliff-dweller ruins 
which, with those in New Mexico and Arizona, constitute 
some of the most valuable and interesting prehistoric re- 
mains in the United States. Already much of this archae- 
ological treasure of inestimable scientific value has been 
carried away by visitors, while, instead of permitting this 
region to be thus despoiled, it should be made easily 
accessible to tourists and held as one of the grand show 
places of the great Southwest. Like the Grand Canon 
and the Petrified Forests of Arizona, like the Pike's Peak 
region in Colorado, Mesa Verde would become an objective 
point of pilgrimage to thousands of summer tourists. In 
the winter of 1904-5 Representative Lacey, of Iowa, the 
eminent chairman of the House Committee on Public 
Lands, made in behalf of his committee a favorable report 
on the Colorado Cliff-dwellers' Bill, presenting, with his 
characteristic eloquence of argument, the truth that the 
permanent preservation of these wonderful and almost 
prehistoric ruins is greatly to be desired by the people of 
the Southwest, as well as by those interested in archaeology 
elsewhere. "The ruins are situated among rocky cliffs, 
and may be easily preserved if protected, 11 said Mr. Lacey, 
and added : 

"With the exception of two or three small, fallen, and 
totally uninteresting ones, all the ruins of the Mesa Verde 
are in the Southern Ute Indian Reservation. It is an ex- 
tremely arid region, and little or no agriculture is practised 



116 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

by the Utes, although they range sheep, goats, cattle, and 
ponies on the mesa and in the canons. It is a poor range at 
best, and the Indians appear to need all they can get. More- 
over, the reclamation service has made some estimates re- 
garding storage reservoirs in the upper Mancos, and it may 
be at some future time a part of this land in the reservation 
will be irrigable and greatly increased in value. The Utes 
are not going to destroy these ruins or dig in them. They 
stand in superstitious awe of them, believing them to be 
inhabited by the spirits of the dead, and cannot be induced 
to go near them." 

These dwellings are excavated in cliffs from five to nine 
hundred feet above the plateaus. Of these, two dwellings 
stand out prominently, — the " Spruce Tree House " and 
the " Balcony House," the former of which contains a 
hundred and thirty rooms, of each of which the average 
measurement is about eight by six feet. Much pottery, 
weapons, armament, and many skeletons and mummies are 
found in these dwellings. 

The later conclusions of scientists are that these cliff- 
houses were designed as places of refuge and defence rather 
than as ordinary habitations. The parallelogram and 
circle forms predominate, and they are often forty feet in 
diameter. There are sometimes double, or even triple 
walls, solidly built of hewn stone, with a circular depres- 
sion (council-chamber) in the centre. 

Pueblo is the metropolis of Southern Colorado. It is 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 117 

the second city in the state, ranking next to Denver. It 
is an important industrial centre, being the location of 
the great steel works of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Com- 
pany, and two large smelting plants in constant activity. 
It is a town with unusual possibilities of beauty, ram- 
bling, as it does, over the rolling mesas with a series of 
enchanting vistas and mountain views of great beauty. 
The Spanish Peaks are in full sight from the new residence 
region of Pueblo, and here is the home of ex-Governor 
and Mrs. Alva Adams, with its spacious, book-lined 
rooms ; its choice and finely selected souvenirs of foreign 
travel ; its music and pictures ; and far above all, the 
gracious sweetness and charm of Mrs. Adams, who has 
that most perfect of gifts — that of transforming a house- 
hold into a home. Governor Adams, although in his 
modesty he would deprecate the distinction, is easily the 
first citizen of Colorado. Twice the Governor of the state, 
he has impressed the entire people with his flawless integ- 
rity of character, his noble ideals, and his energy of execu- 
tive power in securing and enforcing the best measures 
for the people and carrying onward into practical life the 
highest moral and educational standards. 

Governor Adams is always greatly in demand as a 
speaker, and in September of 1906 he was again nomi- 
nated for Governor of the state. 

Colorado, quite irrespective of party, is all aglow 
with the name of Alva Adams. Good Republicans have 



118 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

long been greatly perplexed over the fact that the man 
they most desire to vote for, the man to whose guidance 
they would most willingly commit the affairs of state, 
is a Democrat. The ability, the unquestioned integ- 
rity, the fidelity to lofty ideals, and the great admin- 
istrative power of Governor Adams inspire the almost 
universal enthusiasm of Colorado irrespective of party 
lines. 

No son of the Centennial State is more in sympathy 
with its individual problems. Born in Wisconsin (some 
fifty-five years ago), Governor Adams was about to enter 
the Ann Arbor Law School when the illness of a brother 
brought him in his earliest youth to Colorado. Its 
beauty, its rich possibilities, enchanted him. Here he 
married a very cultivated and beautiful young woman, 
whose parents came in her early girlhood to Colorado, 
and whose sympathetic and perfect companionship has 
been the unfailing source of his noblest inspiration. 

In an address on " Pathfinders and Pioneers,'" given 
before an irrigation congress at Colorado Springs, we find 
Governor Adams saying : 

" What a sublime moment when the explorer realizes the 
fruition of his dream ! What fateful hours upon the dial of 
human progress when Columbus saw a new world emerge 
from the sea, when Balboa stood ( silent upon a peak in 
Darien/ when Lewis and Clark upon the continent's crest 
saw the waters of the rivulet run toward the West ! Such 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 119 

events compensate great souls, and their spirits defy hardship, 
ingratitude, chains, dungeons, and the axe. The curtain has 
been run down upon the careers of those brave men whose 
praise we sing. Their race is run. The explorer, priest, 
trapper, and pioneer have vanished. 

" * Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 
The four first acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 
Time's noblest offspring is the last. ' 

" Would it be a daring assumption to consider the irrigated 
regions of America as the arena in which the fifth act, time's 
noblest offspring, is to perfect and complete the drama of 
civilization ? 

"Irrigated lands were the cradle of the race. The first 
canals were run from the four rivers of Paradise. May not 
the fruition of mankind seek the same conditions amid which 
it was born ? Providence has kept fallow this new land until 
man was fitted to enter and possess it. 

" 'Hid in the West through centuries, 

Till men, through countless tyrannies, could understand 
The priceless worth of freedom.' " 

"I would not decry culture and refinement," said ex- 
Governor Adams in this address ; " they are the charm 
and beauty of modern life, the music and art of the social 
commerce of the age ; but in their acquirement I would 
not give up the robust, vigorous, daring qualities of the 
pioneer." 



120 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

The Governor proceeded : 

"They had blood and iron in their heart, they had the 
nerve to dare, the strength to do. I do not believe in battle 
for battle's sake ; but I never want to see our people when 
they are not willing to fight, and able to fight. The only 
guarantee of peace and liberty is the ability and willing- 
ness to do battle for your rights. Refinement alone is not 
strength, culture alone is not virtue. Absalom, Alcibiades, 
and Burr stand in history as the most polished, cultured men 
of three ages, yet they were more a menace than a brace to 
the liberties of their time. In stress, the world calls upon 
the Calvins, the Cromwells, the Jacksons, Browns, and Lin- 
colns. They were stalwart, strenuous, courageous men ; not 
cultured and refined, but rich in royalty and daring. It is 
the rugged and the strong, and not the gentle and the wise, 
who gather in their hands the reins of fate and plough deep 
furrows in the fields of human events. It is they who have 
driven the car of progress and have woven the deepest colors 
in the fabric of human happiness. It is true that some of our 
Western torch-bearers were not perfect ; none of them were 
ever anointed with the oil of consecration ; around them 
surged the temptations of a wild and boisterous age ; through 
their hearts and souls there swept the impulses and passions 
of the strong ; if they sinned, it was against themselves, not 
their country. Let their frailties be forgotten, and their 
good cherished. Often rough and defiant of the convention- 
alities, they were ever true and loyal, and most of these em- 
pire builders can stand before the great white throne with 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 121 

open hearts. They were the architects, the Hiram Abifs of 
these Western empires. They laid the foundations in courage 
and liberty." 

Let no one fancy that Pueblo is a primitive Western 
city devoid of electricity, telephones, motor cars, or even 
Marconigrams. Let no one fancy it is too far from Paris 
to have the latest French fashions. It is hardly an ex- 
aggeration to say that it demands the best and the most 
up-to-date ideas of the Eastern cities to be at all eligible in 
these Colorado towns. Pueblo has a most delightful club- 
house on the edge of a lake — the lake is artificially created, 
and being made to order, is, of course, exactly the kind of 
lake that is desired, the water being conducted from the 
mountains into a large natural depression — where great 
open fires in every room greet the daily visitor; where 
there are large reading-rooms, a dining-room, and a ball- 
room ; no intoxicating beverages of any kind are allowed 
to be sold, so that youths and maidens may at any time 
enjoy the club with no insidious dangers to their moral 
welfare. 

There are many centres of social life; and if Pueblo 
people have any other conceivable occupation than to give 
dinner parties at night and go motoring in the morn- 
ing, with endless receptions of the Daughters of the 
Revolution and other clubs, organizations, or purely pri- 
vate card receptions invading the afternoons, the visitor 
hardly realizes it. The dinners given are often as elabo- 



122 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

rate as in the large Eastern cities, as one, for instance, 
given by Mr. and Mrs. Mahlon D. Thatcher at their stately 
home " HiRcrest," where the decorations were all in rich 
rose red, a most brilliant effect, and the souvenirs were 
India ink reproductions of old castles on white satin. 
The dinner cards held each a quotation from the poets. 

Pueblo is always all sunshine and radiance, and has a 
beauty of location that makes it notable, with its encir- 
cling blue mountains and picturesque mesas, and the per- 
petual benediction of the Spanish Peaks silhouetted against 
the western sky. Its new library is the pride and delight 
of every citizen. It is one of the Carnegie chain, — a 
large, two-story and basement structure of white Colorado 
stone, the interior finished with the richly variegated 
Colorado marble which is used for mantels and fireplaces. 
The book stacks, the spacious and splendid reading-room, 
the children's room, and the smaller ones for reference and 
special study, are all planned on the latest and most 
perfect models. 

The library is in the Royal Park, on the crest of one of 
the mesas, very near the home of Governor Adams. It is 
a library to delight the heart of the book-lover. Pueblo 
offers, indeed, great attractions to all who incline to this 
land of sunshine. The climate is even more mild than 
that of Denver, from which city it is a little over three 
hours distant by the fast trains, or four hours by slower 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 123 

ones. Colorado Springs lies between — two hours from 
Denver and a little over one hour from Pueblo. The loca- 
tion combines many attractions. With three railroads ; 
its large industries in smelting and steel; its excellent 
schools, both public and private ; its churches, its daily 
newspapers ; its library ; and its fine clubhouse, open to 
families, — women and children as well as men enjoying it 
freely, — Pueblo seems one of the most delightful of places. 
It has large wealth and a power of initiating many oppor- 
tunities. It is on the most picturesque and delightful 
lines of travel to Canon City, Salida, Leadville, Glen- 
wood Springs, and through Salt Lake City to the Pacific 
Coast ; or on the line to Arizona and the Grand Canon 
of the Colorado, and on to Los Angeles and San Fran- 
cisco ; or eastward to Chicago and the Atlantic Coast ; or 
southward to Mexico, or St. Louis, or New Orleans. 
Pueblo is really in the heart of things, so to speak. The 
Chicago papers arrive the next day, the New York papers 
the third morning, and the telephonic communication is 
simply almost without limit. Governor Adams will step 
from his library into another book-lined room where the 
telephone is placed, and from there talk with people in 
five different states. Once he held a conversation with a 
man at the bottom of a mine a few hundred miles away, 
— a man whose subterranean sojourn had the alleviation 
of a telephone. 

The greatest industrial organization west of the Missis- 



124 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

sippi River is that of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 
whose largest plant is at Pueblo, and is held at a valuation 
of fifty-eight million dollars. On its pay-roll are fifteen 
thousand employes. There are twenty thousand tons of 
steel rail produced each month, and it is said that this 
number will soon be largely increased, and that the 
Goulds and the Rockefellers are arranging to utilize the 
product of these mills for their vast railroad interests. 
The company owns such large tracts of land in Colorado, 
New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming ; it owns coal mines, 
iron mines, lime quarries ; it owns parts of two rail- 
roads, besides telegraph and telephone lines galore, so 
that by reason of these extensive holdings it is able to 
secure at a minimum of cost all the raw materials from 
which the finished products are turned out. Upward of 
three hundred thousand acres of the richest coal lands in 
the West, an empire containing one hundred square miles 
more than the coal area of Pennsylvania, constitute the 
holdings for coal mine purposes of the company. In 
addition there are iron, manganese mines, and limestone 
quarries containing the elements which give to the product 
of the furnaces and mills qualities that secure the markets 
of the Western world. Its plant at Pueblo has become 
the centre of a town called Minnequa, composed of its 
own employes and their families. The company has 
established a model hospital, with a surgeon's department 
fitted up with the most elaborate and finest scientific 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 125 

and nursing facilities ; a fine library and large reading- 
rooms, and a recreation hall and gymnasium for the work- 
men. Nearly one million dollars has been expended on 
the tenant houses belonging to the company, which are 
rented to their employes on fair and advantageous terms. 
In many respects Minnequa, at Pueblo, is one of the most 
remarkable manufacturing centres in the world, present- 
ing aspects that invite study, in its extensive resources, 
the vast and colossal character of its purposes, and its 
remarkable achievements. All employes are given the 
opportunity to acquire homes ; and every late ideal in 
the way of providing opportunities for their care in 
health, in mental and moral development, and in recrea- 
tions, is carried out to the fullest possible extent. 

The company has recently engaged in an irrigation 
enterprise in the purchase of water-right priorities of the 
Arkansas River for seventy cubic feet of water per second, 
at an expense of one million dollars. These rights, which 
date back to 1860-62, are among the oldest existing, and 
they insure to the company the uninterrupted and cer- 
tain possession of the river flow. A court decree enabled 
them to change the point of division, and they have 
constructed a new head-gate at Adobe, six miles east of 
Florence. A canal fifty-eight miles in length is being 
constructed from Florence to the mills owned by the 
company. The cost of this canal will be some three 
quarters of a million. These mills produce over seventy- 



126 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

five thousand tons of iron and steel each month. The 
manufacturing plant at Minnequa includes blast furnaces, 
converting works, blooming mills, a merchant iron mill, 
a hoop and cotton tie mill, a spike factory, a bolt factory, 
a castings and pipe foundry, with open hearth furnaces, a 
reversing mill, and many other appliances. 

" It must not be supposed, because we find it necessary 
to practise irrigation in Colorado, that we therefore never 
have any rains," observed a Coloradoan ; " on the contrary, 
the rains of spring are usually of such abundance as to 
make the ground in fine condition for ploughing and put- 
ting in crops, and we seldom find it necessary to apply 
water to germinate any kind of seed ; only once, in thirteen 
years'* experience at Greeley, were we compelled to resort 
to irrigation before crops of all kinds were well up and 
considerably advanced in growth. About the last of May, 
however, as regularly as the natural periods of summer, 
autumn, winter, and spring occur in the other states, 
never varying more than a week in time, these copious 
rains suddenly cease and give place to light and entirely 
inadequate local thunder-showers. Now is the accepted 
time, and all over cultivated Colorado, within a period of 
not more than two days, every flood-gate is opened and 
the life-giving current started to flowing on the rapidly 
parching grain. Corn will endure until later in the 
season, but all sowed crops must get one thorough appli- 
cation of water within two weeks or become severely 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 127 

injured for the want of it. Day and night the silent 
current flows on and on, among the fields of grain ; not a 
drop of water nor a moment of time must run to waste 
until the first irrigation is completed." 

In so exceptional a summer of drought and heat as 
was that of 1901 the advantages of irrigation stand out. 
Journeying through Kansas, the long day's ride across 
the state revealed continued devastation from the lack 
of rain. Corn fields looked almost as if a fire had 
passed over them, so shrivelled and stunted they were; 
but in Colorado on every hand there were greenness and 
luxuriance of vegetation and of crops. The result is sim- 
ply that, with irrigation, man controls his climate and all 
the conditions of prosperity. Without it, he is at the 
mercy of the elements. 

The Union Colony of Greeley was the first to introduce 
upland irrigation in Colorado. Of the method employed, 
the " Greeley Tribune" gave this description : 

" Almost the first question asked by many persons on their 
first arrival in Colorado, when they see the irrigating ditches 
running along the sides of the bluffs high above the river, and 
back from it five, ten, or twenty miles, is, ' How do you get 
the water out of the river, and so high above it ? It looks 
as if you made the water run uphill.' The answer is very 
simple. All the rivers of Colorado are mountain streams, and 
consequently have a fall of from ten to thirty feet to the 
mile, after they reach the plains. In the mountains, of 



128 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

course, the fall is often much greater. The plains also have 
a gradual slope eastward from the foothills, where the altitude 
is generally between six and seven thousand feet above sea 
level, while at the eastern boundary of the state it is only 
about three thousand feet. Take, for example, the canal 
generally known as Number Two, which waters the lands of 
the Greeley Colony. This canal is taken out of the Cache 
la Poudre River, about seventeen miles west of Greeley, and 
where the bed of the river is probably a hundred and sixty 
feet higher than it is at Greeley. The bed of the canal only 
has a fall of from three to three and a half feet to the mile ; 
therefore it is easily seen that when that grade is continued 
for a number of miles, the line of the canal will run in a 
direction further and further from the river, and on much 
higher ground, so that the lands lying between the canal and 
the river are all * covered by,' or on a lower level than, the 
water in the canal. In the process of irrigation this same 
plan must be followed, of bringing the water in on the higher 
side of the land to be irrigated, then the water will easily 
flow all over the ground." 

In Weld County, of which Greeley is the county seat, 
irrigation was extended during 1905 to cover from fifteen 
thousand to twenty thousand acres of arid land never 
before under cultivation, and storage reservoirs increased 
in capacity. It is proposed to cut a tunnel through the 
Medicine Bow mountain range and to bring a large quan- 
tity of water through from the Western slope to irrigate 
an additional fifty thousand acres of prairie. 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 129 

Within the past year there have been two potato starch 
factories started in successful operation in Greeley which 
are estimated to pay out annually one hundred thousand 
dollars for potatoes that have heretofore been practically 
a total loss to the farmers. 

The Swift Packing Company of Chicago propose invest- 
ing one and a half millions in further irrigation in this 
county. The products of the Greeley district alone, for 
1905, were five and a half millions, — a fact that suggests 
the wise foresight of Hon. Nathan Cook Meeker, the 
founder of the town, in selecting this location, in 1869, 
for his colony. 

Of recent years a remarkable feature of agricultural 

progress in Colorado has been developed by the " dry 

farming " system, the discovery of which is due to Prof. 

H. W. Campbell, who has been experimenting, for some 

twenty years past, in Eastern Colorado, in the scientific 

culture of the soil without benefit of irrigation. Professor 

Campbell says that he had been assured that corn would 

not grow at an altitude of three thousand feet, as the 

nights would be too cool ; but that he can refute this, as, 

during the past five years, he has averaged from thirty to 

forty-two bushels per acre at an altitude ranging from 

five thousand to nearly seven thousand feet. Successful 

agriculture is, in Professor Campbell's belief, based on the 

fundamental principle of soil culture, and in an interview 

he said : 

9 



130 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

" While the great work now being done by the government 
in promoting irrigation enterprises in the more arid portion 
of the West and the using of millions upon millions of money 
for the building of mammoth reservoirs have value and virtue, 
and means the development of many sections that must 
remain almost worthless without them, and the spending of 
thousands of dollars in traversing foreign countries to secure 
what some have pleased to call drought-resisting plants, will 
undoubtedly play their part in promoting the welfare and pros- 
perity of Colorado, . . . yet there should also be an under- 
standing of, first, the necessary physical condition of the soil 
for the most liberal growth and development of roots ; sec- 
ondly, the storing and conserving the entire season rainfall, 
— not only the portion that falls during the growing season, 
but from the early spring to late in the fall ; thirdly, the fact 
that air is just as important in the soil as water, and that it is 
the combination of the elements of air and water in the soil, 
together with heat and light, that is most essential ; and that 
when these conditions are fulfilled, Eastern Colorado will 
come to its rightful own, and little towns and cities will 
spring up along all the great trunk lines, while the interven- 
ing country will be dotted with ideal farm homes and shade 
trees ; orchards and groves will break the monotony of the 
now bleak prairie, and present a restful, cheerful, homelike, 
and prosperous condition." 

While agriculture in Colorado is regarded as in its in- 
fancy, yet the product of Colorado farms alone contributed 
almost fifty-one millions to the world's wealth, in 1905, 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 131 

exclusive of wool, hides, or live stock. Professor Olin of the 
State Agricultural College estimates that there are over 
two hundred thousand acres in Colorado which produce 
crops without irrigation, by the application of Professor 
Campbell's "dry-farming 11 system. The so-called dry 
land, consisting of millions of acres in Eastern Colorado, 
averages now four dollars per acre, where one year ago 
untold quantities could be bought for an average of two 
dollars per acre. The speculative value of this land has 
gone up wonderfully under the impetus of the Campbell 
system of dry farming. If this system comes anywhere 
near proving the claims of its advocates, it will vastly 
increase the wealth and population of the state. With 
a greater understanding of the science of dry culture it 
is certain that the farmers of the state and the state 
generally will experience immeasurable advantage. In 
the eastern plains of Colorado are embraced more than 
fifteen million acres of land which are now lying practi- 
cally useless, only a small amount being utilized for rang- 
ing cattle. The claims of dry-culture enthusiasts and those 
who have been experimenting with seed imported to meet 
the dry conditions are, that this empire will be made 
to yield harvests which will support many thriving com- 
munities. In proof of their claims they point to so-called 
model farms established at various places on the plains 
where the hitherto unyielding soil has borne substantial 
crops. 



132 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

One important feature in the agricultural development 
of Colorado is the extinction of the bonanza ranch of thou- 
sands of acres. Instead, farms are reduced to manageable 
proportions, and are carried on far more largely by intel- 
ligent thought and scientific appliances than by mere 
manual labor. 

The present day Colorado ranch is an all-the-year-round 
enterprise. The ranch owner is a careful business man, 
who watches his acres and the products thereof even as the 
successful merchant or manufacturer acquires close knowl- 
edge of all the details of his business. He sows his land 
with diversified crops, rotating hay, grain, and root crops 
scientifically for the double purpose of securing the great- 
est yields and preserving the nourishing qualities of the 
soil. Keeping in touch with the market conditions of the 
world, and with the advancing developments of science, he 
is easily the master of the situation, and in no part of the 
country is the condition of the farmer better, or perhaps 
so good, as in Colorado. The agriculturist of the Centen- 
nial State who is the owner of two quarter sections, or even 
of one, is altogether independent. The returns from his 
business are absolutely sure, and with the certain knowledge 
of substantial gains at the end of the season he plans im- 
provements to his home, and comforts and even luxuries for 
himself and family, which far exceed those usually secured 
in the Middle West or by the small farmers of the East. 
In Colorado it will be found that almost every young man 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 133 

and woman of those who are natives of the state are 
college graduates. Co-education prevails, just as does the 
political enfranchisement of women, and the results of this 
larger extension of the opportunities and privileges of life 
are very much in evidence in the beauty, the high intelli- 
gence, and the liberal culture that especially characterize 
the women of Colorado. 

Irrigation enterprises in Colorado are far more widely 
recognized than is the Campbell system of dry culture ; 
but in 1905 these enterprises appealed with increased force 
to capitalists outside, as well as within Colorado, as a safe 
and profitable means of investment. Land held at ten 
dollars per acre is, by irrigation, instantly increased in 
value from twenty to fifty dollars ; and it was seen that 
the most favorable localities within the state in which to 
raise funds for further extension of irrigation were among 
the farmers in the older irrigated sections who have won 
their ranches, improved their places, and made large depos- 
its in the banks through the use of the productive waters 
trained to make the soil blossom with wealth. 

Irrigation is developed to its highest excellence in North- 
ern Colorado and in the valley of the Arkansas River. 
These regions have been the longest under irrigated cul- 
ture, and their value is increasing rapidly. Each year 
sees the agriculturist grow more conservative in his use 
of water, and the quantity thus saved has been applied 
to new lands. Thus, in an interesting and quite un- 



134 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

dreamed-of way, a problem that incited discord and dis- 
sension, that promised only to increase inevitably as larger 
territories of land and their correspondingly increased irri- 
gation should be held, was brought to a peaceful solution. 
Continued litigation, and a great pressure to secure legis- 
lative restrictions of the use of water supply, and the con- 
stant irritation and turmoil involved in these disputes, 
were all, happily, laid to rest by the discovery of the 
farmers themselves that extravagance in the use of water 
was not conducive to their own prosperity. In the mat- 
ter of flood waters the irrigation experts of the state are 
quite generally meeting the condition in their own way. 
Storage reservoirs are dotting the irrigation systems at 
frequent intervals, and in the dry months the supply piled 
up behind the cement dams is drawn off to furnish the 
final necessary moisture for the maturing of the crops. 

Another possibility of irrigation that is receiving the 
attention of engineers is the utilization of the streams for 
power purposes. In many cases the power thus generated 
will be made to accomplish marvellous feats in the way of 
construction, as in the instance at Grand River, already 
described. 

One of the special journeys in Colorado is that called a 
" trip around the circle,"" affording more than a thousand 
miles among the mountains within four days 1 time ; but a 
permission for ten days is available, thus affording several 
detours by stage, which penetrate into the most sublime 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 135 

regions. The abysmal depth of five of the great canons ; 
many of the noted mountain passes ; great mining camps, 
with their complicated machinery ; cliff-dwellings, vast 
plateaus, and stupendous peaks ; Indian reservations ; the 
icy crevasses a thousand feet in depth ; the picturesque 
" Continental Divide, 1 ' from which one looks down on a 
thousand mountain peaks, where the vast Cordilleras in 
their rugged grandeur are seen as a wide plain ; the beau- 
tiful Sangre de Cristo (" Blood of Christ ") range ; the 
sharp outlines of the Spanish Peaks, rising twelve and 
thirteen thousand feet into the air ; beautiful meadow 
lands where the blue and white columbine, the state flower 
of Colorado, blooms in profusion, and the tiger lily, the 
primrose, and the " shooting stars " blossom, — all these 
are enjoyed within the "circle" trip; and it also in- 
cludes Leadville, the "city above the clouds," Durango, 
Ouray, Gunnison, and other interesting towns. It offers a 
near view of the Mount of the Holy Cross, which strange 
spectacle is made by the snow deposits in transverse, gigan- 
tic canons, — the perpendicular one being fifteen hundred 
feet, while the transverse cross is seven hundred and fifty 
feet in length ; of Lost Canon, a novelty even in a land 
of canons; and of the Rio de Las Animas Perditas, old 
Fort Lewis, the valley of Dolores River, a region of 
early Spanish discovery ; of Black Canon and Cimarron 
Canon and Grand River Canon, whose walls rise to the 
height of more than twenty-five hundred feet ; — all these 



136 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

are but the merest outline and hint of the scenic wonders 
compassed within the circle trip. Up the canons the train 
climbs ; through narrow gorges with overhanging rocks, on 
and on, till a plateau is reached ; then more canons, more 
climbing, more peaks towering into the skies, and water- 
falls chiming their music. As even an enthusiast in scen- 
ery cannot entirely subsist on stars, sunsets, and silences, 
the luxurious comforts of these trains enhance one's enjoy- 
ment. A dining-car is always on, and the excellence of 
the food and the moderate prices for all this perfect com- 
fort and convenience are features the traveller appreciates. 
That dance of the Brocken which one fancies he sees in 
the fantastic sandstone formations on the mountain's side 
on the romantic route to Glenwood Springs is occasion- 
ally duplicated in other canons, where these strange rocks 
resolve themselves, with the aid of the mysterious lights 
and shadows, into a dance of witches, and every shape 
springs to life. The train rushes on, and one leaves them 
dancing, confident that although these figures may be sta- 
tionary by day, they dance at night. Another mountain 
slope of the sandstone shows a colossal figure of a prophet, 
— shrouded, hooded, suggesting that solemn, majestic 
figure of death in Daniel French's great work entitled 
" Death and the Sculptor." The precipitous walls of the 
canon rise in many places to over a thousand feet in height. 
In their sides such a variety of designs and figures have 
been sculptured by erosion that the traveller half im- 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 137 

agines himself in the realm of the gods of Hellas. These 
innumerable designs and figures incite not only the play 
of fancy, but they invite the study of the geologist, 
who finds here the primary rock formations exhibited in 
the most varied and striking manner. As the train 
winds deeper into the heart of the projecting rocks the 
crested crags loom up beyond the sight ; below, the river 
rushes in foaming torrents and only a faint arch of 
the sky is seen. There are recesses never penetrated 
by the sun. 

Another group of the sandstone shapes, under the trans- 
formation of moonlight, resolved itself into a band of 
angels, and still another mountain-side seems to be the 
scene of ballet dancers. The splendid heights of Dolores 
Peak and Expectation Mountain, the Lizard Head, the 
Cathedral Spires, the Castle Peaks of the Sangre de Cristo 
— what points and groups that fairly focus all conceiv- 
able sublimity they form ! Here is a state more than 
a third larger than all New England ; it is the state of 
sunsets and of stars ; of scenery that is impressive and 
uplifting, rather than merely picturesque ; a state whose 
plains, even, are of the same altitude as the summit of 
Mount Washington in the White Mountains, and whose 
mountains and peaks ascend to an altitude of over two 
miles above this height. Of the total extent of Colorado, 
the mountains, inclusive of parks and foothills, occupy 
two-thirds of the area. So it is easily realized to what 



138 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

extent they dominate the scene. But great and impres- 
sive as they are in effect, the mountain features have an 
undoubted influence, however unconsciously received, on 
the character of the people. The effect of beauty on 
character is incalculable. When to beauty is added 
sublimity, how much greater must this effect be ! It was 
not mere rhetoric when the Psalmist exclaimed, " I will lift 
up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. 
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and 
earth. . . . The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. 
He shall preserve thy soul. 11 It is this train of thought 
which is inevitably suggested to the mind in gazing upon 
the stately, solemn impressiveness of the mountain scenery. 
Nature has predestined Colorado for the theatre of noble 
life, and the influence is all -pervading. 

Great engineering feats are in evidence all over Colo- 
rado. Miles of railway tunnels pass through the moun- 
tains. No mountain, not even Pike^ Peak, is regarded in 
Colorado as being in any sense an obstacle to any form of 
the extension of travel. The railroad either passes through 
it or. climbs it. The matter is apparently simple to the 
railroad mind, and evidently all the peaks of the Hima- 
layas piled on Pike's or Long's peaks — "Ossa piled on 
Pelion " — would not daunt the Coloradoan enterprise. 
In fact, the greater the obstacle, the greater is the enter- 
prise thereby incited to overcome it. In the most literal 
way obstacles in this land of enchantment are miraculously 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 139 

transformed to stepping-stones. But what would you, — 
in an Enchanted Country ? 

Colorado has four great systems of parks whose eleva- 
tion is from seven to nine thousand feet : North Park, 
with an area of some twenty-five hundred square miles ; 
South Park, one thousand ; Middle Park, three thousand ; 
and San Luis, with nine thousand four hundred square 
miles, — all sheltered by mountains, watered by perpetual 
streams, and so rich in grass lands as to afford perpetual 
grazing and farming resources. Colorado has nearly one 
thousand inland lakes, and over two hundred and fifty 
rivers fed from mountain snows. Its grand features in- 
clude mountains, canons, gorges and deep chasms, crags 
and heights ; its mountain systems cover more than five 
times the area of the Alps, and its luminous, electrically 
exhilarating air, its play of color, and the necromancy of 
distances that seem near when afar — all linger in the 
memory as a dream of ecstatic experiences. Colorado is 
all a splendor of color, of vista, and of dream. It is the 
most poetic of states. 

Now the fact that this country has been importing over 
two million tons of sugar a year lends importance to the 
beet sugar factories already largely established. Colorado 
has a future in beet sugar hardly second to her gold- 
mining interests, if her interests receive the national safe- 
guarding that is her due. 

Colorado and the Philippines were brought into collision 



140 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

of interests by the attempt to reduce the tariff on sugar 
imported from those islands. This would ruin the beet 
sugar industry in the Centennial State, which is already be- 
ginning to transform it into one of the richest agricultural 
states in the Union. 

This industry is absolutely identified with the irrigation 
interests of Colorado, as it is the arid land irrigated that 
offers the best facilities for the sugar beets. 

The beet sugar enterprise means remunerative work for 
the farmer, good business for the railroads and merchants, 
and an incalculable degree of prosperity for all Colorado. 
Thomas F. Walsh, of Ouray, Colorado, and of Washing- 
ton, made an earnest protest against this movement. 

Mr. Walsh is a great capitalist, but while he has not 
one dollar concerned in the beet sugar enterprise of his 
state, he is a loyal and devoted son of Colorado. In a 
convincing manner he said: 

"... It is not a small thing, this robbery of American 
farmers and home-makers for the benefit of sugar corporations 
and exploiters of Philippine labor. It means the ultimate ruin 
of an industry that is full of the brightest promise for thou- 
sands of Americans. It means that the people of the United 
States shall pay tribute to a trust forever for one of the neces- 
saries of life. . . . The removal of protection to Colorado 
sugar growers would simply mean that the sugar trust, or 
cormorants in human form like it, would go to the Philippines, 
employ the peons at starvation wages, and send millions of 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 141 

tons of sugar to the United States. Would the consumer 
here be benefited ? Not at all. Has the consumer benefited 
by reciprocity with Cuba ? The sugar trust has received a 
gift from the treasury of the United States — that is all." 

And again Mr. Walsh truly says : 

"This proposition is merely a design on the part of enor- 
mously rich, greedy speculators, who are willing to adopt any 
means for the accumulation of more money. Money, money, 
money ! They have already a thousand times more than they 
need, and are simply money mad. They propose to exploit 
the Philippines for their own selfish ends. Help for the poor 
Filipinos, indeed ! Imagine the generosity of these get-rich- 
quick sharks towards the peons in their employ. Think of 
the wages that would be paid, contrasted with the standard 
of living in the United States ! I 'd rather have the people 
of this country exterminated than to be brought to such a 
level." 

Regarding the arid land Mr. Walsh said : 

" With the application of water to this land under the 
National Irrigation Act — one of the greatest acts of states- 
manship accomplished under our broad-minded and far-sighted 
President — the people of Colorado will furnish an outlet for 
a great population, and the cultivation of beets for sugar will 
enable thousands of American citizens to establish homes of 
their own. That is what is now being done in Colorado, and 
the industry is in its infancy. The people have gone in there 
at the suggestion of the government, planted beets provided 



142 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

to them by the agricultural department, and started a great 
industry. There was an implied, if not expressed, promise 
that they were to be protected in this new industry. Yet it 
is now proposed to place them in competition with the peons 
of the Philippines, at the most critical time in the history of 
the industry. The people of the East," continued Mr. Walsh, 
" do not seem to be able to grasp the great possibilities of the 
arid West under the operation of the national irrigation law. 
The West, properly irrigated with water that we know can be 
developed by drainage, wells, and underground flow, will 
easily support fifty millions of people. Think of what this 
means ! Fifty millions of American citizens owning their 
own homes ! It is an incalculable addition to the wealth and 
strength of the United States." 

One of the very valuable and exceptional resources of 
Colorado is in its stone, which equals the world's best prod- 
uct in its quality. Millions of tons of almost every variety 
of building stone lie unclaimed on the hills and plateaus. 
There are quarries in Gunnison County that would make 
their owners multi-millionnaires, could the stone be made 
easy of access or transportation. The difficulty of the 
former, and the high freight charges, combine to delay 
this field of development. In Pueblo there is a marbleized 
sandstone that is very beautiful. Its " crushing " strength, 
as the architectural phrase goes, is between eleven and 
twelve thousand pounds to the square inch, — a strength 
which exceeds the most exacting requirements of any 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 143 

architect. This stone is found in unlimited quantities. 
In the country around Fort Collins there is a red sand- 
stone which is very popular, and this is also found in large 
quantities at Castle Rock, south of Denver. Near Trinidad 
is a gray sandstone of great beauty, and the Amago stone, 
which is used for the Denver Postoffice, is a favorite. 

In stone for decorative purposes also, Colorado is plenti- 
fully supplied. Specimens of marble from the vicinity of 
Redstone show characteristics as beautiful as are seen in 
the finest Italian marble found at Carrara. 

Besides the marble for building there are also vast 
beds of the purest white marble, which will soon be 
placed on the market for statuary purposes. 

Vast deposits of granite are to be found in many differ- 
ent sections of the state. In Clear Creek County, about 
Silver Plume and Georgetown, there are mountains of 
granite. In the southern part of the state deposits are 
found which are used extensively for monumental pur- 
poses, and great quantities of this granite are shipped 
out of the state. 

Although only a limited amount of work in the way 
of development and seeking markets has been done for 
Colorado stone, the value of the sales is already an 
appreciable source of revenue. 

Statistically, Colorado ranks first in the United States 
as to the yield of gold and silver ; first in the area of 
land under irrigation ; first as to the quality of wheat, 



144 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

potatoes, and melons, and as to the percentage of sugar in 
the sugar beet. The state ranks fifth in coal and iron; 
sixth in live stock, and eighth in agriculture. It is true, 
however, that irrigated agriculture is considered to be the 
most important interest in Colorado. The Centennial 
State is not, primarily, as has often been supposed, a 
mining state ; the mines, rich and varied in products as 
they are, offer yet a value secondary to that of agriculture. 
A mine is always an uncertainty. A rich pocket may be 
found that is an isolated one and leads to nothing of a 
permanently rich deposit. A vast outlay of time and 
expensive mechanism can be made that will not result 
in any returns. An apparently rich mine may suddenly 
come to an end ; the miner may have reason to believe 
that if he could go down some thousands of feet he would 
again strike the rich vein ; he may do this at great cost 
of machinery and labor only to find that the vein has 
totally disappeared, or does not exist. All these and 
many other mischances render mining something very far 
from an exact science, — something, indeed, totally incal- 
culable, even to the specialists and experts, — while agri- 
culture is an industry whose conditions render it within 
reasonable probabilities of control and calculation. The 
great problem which continues to confront Colorado, and 
to a far greater extent Arizona, is the more complete 
understanding of what Prof. Elwood Mead, the govern- 
ment expert in national irrigation problems, calls " the 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 145 

duty of water" and the conditions which influence it as 
a basis for planning the larger and costlier works which 
must be built in the future. 

" One of the leading objects of expert irrigation investi- 
gation is to determine the duty of water, 1 ' says Professor 
Mead, and he adds : 

"In order to do this it is necessary to deal with a large 
range of climatic conditions, and to study the influence of 
different methods of application and the requirements of 
different crops. Farmers need an approximate knowledge 
of the duty of water in order to make intelligent contracts for 
their supply. It is needed by the engineer and investors in 
order to plan canals and reservoirs properly. Without this 
knowledge every important transaction in the construction of 
irrigation w r orks/or in the distribution of water therefrom, is 
very largely dependent on individual judgment or conjec- 
ture. ... In constructing reservoirs it is as necessaiy to 
know w r hether they w T ill be filled in a few years by silt as to 
know that the dam rests on a solid foundation ; and it is as 
desirable to provide some means for the removal of this sedi- 
mentary accumulation as it is to provide an adequate waste 
way for floods." 

The problems of irrigation are evidently highly com- 
plicated ones. There are large tracts of irrigated land 
selling at three hundred dollars an acre which, fifty years 
ago, were held as worthless desert regions. The value of 

water rights has risen from four to thirty-five dollars an 

10 



146 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

acre. The Platte River and its tributaries, alone, irrigate 
one million nine hundred and twenty-four thousand four 
hundred and sixty-five acres. In the South Platte the 
average flow of water is two thousand seven hundred and 
sixty-five feet a second. The North Platte and its tribu- 
taries irrigate about nine hundred thousand acres. There 
are now over two million acres in Colorado under actual 
irrigation, with an agricultural population of some one 
hundred and fifty thousand, with a total income of over 
thirty millions. The agricultural population is increas- 
ing so rapidly that the day cannot be distant when it will 
reach a million, with a total production of more than one 
hundred and fifty million dollars. It is believed that an 
expenditure of forty millions in irrigation at the present 
time would immediately result in an increment of from 
two hundred to three hundred millions. The irrigation 
bill that passed Congress in 1904 proved of the most 
beneficial nature to Colorado ; not only for its immediate 
effects, but for the promise it implied and the confidence 
inspired in the immediate future. The encouragement 
of irrigation in Colorado is the influence that enlarges and 
develops the agricultural efforts, promoting the growing 
industry of beet sugar and extending all resources. Be- 
yond the material results there lie, too, the most impor- 
tant social conditions of the greater content and industry 
of the people and the corresponding decrease of tendencies 
toward anarchy and disorder. 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 147 

In the quarter of a century — with the sixth year now 
added — since Colorado became a state there has passed 
over twenty million acres of government lands into the 
individual ownership of men whose capital, for the most 
part, consisted solely of the horses and wagon that they 
brought with them. Of this vast area there are some 
two and a half million acres under agricultural cultivation, 
which are assessed at a valuation of some twenty-five 
millions. The Boston and Colorado smelter, established 
in 1873, has produced a valuation in gold, silver, and 
copper of nearly ninety-six millions. In the year of 1905 
the Colorado mines, — gold, silver, lead, copper, and zinc, 
— all told, produced nearly ninety million dollars. 

The population of Colorado is increasing rapidly, not 
only by the stream of immigration that pours in of those 
who come con intentione, but to a considerable degree by 
those who come only as tourists and visitors, and who 
become so fascinated with Colorado's charm, and so im- 
pressed with her rich and varied resources, that they 
remain. The development of this state is one of the most 
remarkable and thrilling pages in American history. It 
is the story of personal sacrifice, personal heroism, personal 
devotion to the nobler purposes and ideals of life that no 
one can read unmoved. 

" There can be no backward movement, not even a 
check in the steady tramp of such a conquering army,'" 
said the " Denver Republican " editorially. " Before it, 



148 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

mountains melt into bars of gold, of silver, of copper, lead, 
zinc, and iron. It passes over virgin soil, and behind it 
spring up fields of grain and groves of fruit. It brings coal 
from distant fields, rocks from far-away hills, and its arti- 
sans mould and weld and send out tools of trade and articles 
of merchandise to all the world. 

" It pushes the railroads it needs to where it needs them, 
and the world comes to marvel at its audacity. It finds 
to-day what yesterday it needed and to-morrow it must 
have. It waits only the world's needs or pleasures to find 
yet other ways to supply them.'" 

The prosperity of Colorado is a remarkable fact in our 
national history. By some untraced law, defects, faults, 
misfortunes, or crimes are always made more prominent 
than virtue and good fortune. The crime is telegraphed 
everywhere, the good deed is passed over in silence — as a 
rule. And so the strikes, and the outlawry, and the 
discords and troubles of Colorado have been very widely 
heralded, while there has been less general recognition of 
the firm and just governmental authority that has held 
these outbreaks in check, and has almost succeeded in 
ending them entirely. 

In general aspects and conveniences the towns and cities 
are under excellent municipal regulations. Leadville, for- 
merly one of the most lawless of great mining camps, is 
to-day a peaceful and prosperous city on a great trans-conti- 
nental highway. The Western towns begin with wide, clean, 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 149 

beautiful streets. They begin with the most tasteful 
architecture. It may not be the most expensive or the 
most colossal, but it is beautiful. 

Northern Colorado is in many respects a distinctive 
region of itself. It offers rich agricultural facilities ; the 
beet sugar factories at Greeley are making it a commercial 
centre ; the electric trolley line which will soon connect 
Greeley with Denver will multiply the homes and settlements 
within this distance of fifty miles, and this part of Colorado 
is enriched with great coal fields. The latter promise not 
merely their own extension of industries in digging the 
coal and putting it on the market, but they also indicate 
another and far more important result, which stimulates 
the scientific imagination, — that of making Northern 
Colorado a power centre whose strength can be applied in 
a variety of ways and transmitted over a large area of 
country. For more than two years the Government has 
been conducting a series of experiments in a very thorough 
manner, endeavoring to ascertain the gas values of the 
great lignite coal fields between Boulder and Denver. It 
has been discovered that the converting of the coal into 
gas gives it double the efficiency for use as a motor power 
for engine or for fuel than can be gained from the coal in 
its natural state. A ton of coal converted into gas will, as 
gas, give twice the power that the coal would have yielded, 
and give the same power that two tons of coal, that has 
not been converted into gas, would afford. In order, how- 



150 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

ever, to produce this power economically, it must be done 
at the point of mining. It is there that the gas pro- 
ducers must be located ; and from these points the gas 
can be transported in pipes, or can be converted into 
electricity and sent by wires at far less cost than would be 
that of sending the coal itself by freight. These dis- 
coveries not only suggest that this region in Colorado is 
destined in the near future to become a power centre which 
will be tapped from the surrounding country for a great 
distance in all directions, and will thus render Boulder 
one of the most important of Western cities ; but they 
also suggest the evident tendency of the age toward in- 
tensity rather than immensity, — toward the concentration 
of energy in the most ethereal form rather than its 
diffusion through large and clumsy masses of material. 

Colorado contains over twenty-five thousand square 
miles of coal fields, distributed over the state, with an 
average annual product of over seven million tons. No 
other corresponding area in the entire world exceeds Colo- 
rado in its great storage of coal, and the state ranks as one 
of the first in the production of iron. 

There are already fifteen beet sugar factories in opera- 
tion, representing investments amounting to over twelve 
million dollars, and which are estimated to have produced, 
in 1906, an aggregate of some two hundred and twenty thou- 
sand pounds of sugar, the percentage of saccharine matter 
being higher than that of the sugar beet of California. 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 151 

Statistically, Colorado ranks first in irrigation, and there 
are some eighteen thousand miles of irrigating canals 
already in operation, with the system being so rapidly 
extended that it almost outruns the pace of calculation. 
These canals irrigate four million acres of land, of which 
twenty-five hundred is under actual cultivation ; and 
the storage reservoirs already constructed are sufficient to 
place another million of acres under cultivation. This 
irrigated land sells from sixty to one hundred dollars per 
acre. Colorado has a reputation for being a great potato 
state, and in the year 1905 the town of Greeley alone 
shipped over three hundred thousand dollars"' worth of po- 
tatoes, while tomatoes are a feature often yielding ninety 
dollars to the acre, and celery has been estimated to yield 
one hundred and fifty dollars an acre. There are tracts 
of from two to three thousand acres devoted to peas alone, 
producing forty to fifty thousand cans ; and asparagus 
grows with great success. 

Colorado is a fruit country offering the best of condi- 
tions. The peaches of Southern Colorado lead the world 
in flavor, beauty, and size ; the canteloupe flourishes with 
such extraordinary vitality that it often yields a revenue 
of fifty dollars an acre ; and the watermelon also grows in 
unusual perfection. The valley of the Arkansas River is 
the great region for producing melons, and Colorado ex- 
ports these to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. 
Louis. Apples, plums, and pears grow with equally boun- 



152 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

teous success, and there are fruit farms that with their 
orchards and small fruits sometimes realize fifty thousand 
dollars a year, when the season is a good one and the 
market conditions favorable. The seasons of irrigated 
land are largely under control, and surpass those regions 
which are at the mercy of excessive rains or of droughts. 
So the law of compensation still obtains. The resources 
of horticulture, alone, in Colorado are very important, 
and they form one of the most alluring features of this 
beautiful and richly bountiful state. 

In the way of crops, alfalfa takes the lead in Colorado, 
as wheat does in Kansas. It requires the very minimum 
of care ; the land being once planted with alfalfa, there is 
need only of turning on the irrigation, and mowing it, at 
the right time. Alfalfa produces three crops a year, and 
yields from one to two tons per acre. It sells at from 
three to ten dollars a ton, and this makes a revenue quite 
worth considering. The difficulties encountered every- 
where in Colorado, in every branch of industry, or in 
domestic work, are those of securing labor. Wages are 
high in every conceivable line of work, but to a large ex- 
tent the labor and service, even when procured, is of a very 
poor order. In many of the larger hotels employes are 
often kept on the pay-roll for two months at a time when 
not needed, simply because it is impossible to fill their 
places when the need comes. From requirements of the 
seamstress, the laundress, the cook, the maid, the farmer's 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 153 

working-men, or the employes in almost any line of work,' 
the same difficulty exists. Much is heard regarding 
strikes and other forms of the eternal conflict between 
labor and capital ; and yet the high rates paid, the con- 
cessions constantly made to the demands of employes, the 
conditions provided for them, would seem, at a superficial 
glance, to be such as to bridge over every difficulty. Do- 
mestic service is something that presents the greatest prob- 
lem on the part of the employer. If there is so large a 
number of "the unemployed" in the East, why should not 
the conditions balance themselves and this superfluous ele- 
ment find good conditions for living in Colorado ? This 
question involves the problem of economics, with which 
these pages have nothing to do ; but no traveller, no so- 
journer, can linger in Colorado who is not simply lost in 
wonder that the varied work that is waiting, with the 
most liberal payments for the worker, and the multitude 
of workers in the East who need the liberal payment, 
cannot, by some law of elective affinity, be brought 
together. 

When it is realized that the Rocky Mountains occupy 
in Colorado more than five times the entire space of the 
Alps in Europe, their importance in climatic influence as 
well as in scenic magnificence can be understood. The 
forests of Colorado are found on the mountains and foot- 
hills. The heights are covered with a dense growth of 
pine woods, while in lower ranges abound the silver spruce 



154 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

and the cedar. Colorado has a state forestry association 
which aims to secure as a reservation all forests above the 
altitude of eight thousand five hundred feet, as this preser- 
vation is considered most important to the water supply. 
In the Alps there are nine peaks over fourteen thousand 
feet in height ; in the Rocky Mountains, within the limits 
of Colorado alone, there are forty-three peaks, each one of 
which exceeds in height the Jungfrau. There are in 
Colorado more than thirty towns, each of which is the 
theatre of active progress, and each of which lies at an 
altitude exceeding that of the pass of St. Bernard. The 
sublime canons and gorges are eloquent of the story of 
Titanic forces which rent the mountains apart. The 
vast plateaus were once the bed of inland seas. In the 
canon of Grand River towering walls rise to the height 
of half a mile, in sheer precipitous rock, for a distance of 
some sixteen miles. The strata of these rocks are dis- 
tinctly defined, and the play of color is rich and fantastic. 
The vast walls are in brilliant hues of red and amber and 
green and brown, — the blending of color lending its 
enchantment to the marvellous scene. Each canon has 
its own individuality. No one repeats the wild charm of 
another. Excursions abound. There is " the loop," an 
enchanting mountain ride made from Denver within one 
day for the round trip ; the " Rainbow " tour, and others, 
besides that of the " circle " already described. In each 
and all these journeys the route is often on the very 



WANDERINGS IN COLORADO 155 

verge of the abyss, and the sublimities, the splendor of 
coloring, exceed any power of language to suggest. 

In Northwestern Colorado, along the White River and 
northward, lies the sportsman's paradise, now reached only 
by a stage drive of from forty-five to ninety miles from 
the little town of Rifle on the " scenic route " of the Denver 
and Rio Grande, beyond Glen wood Springs. Trapper's 
Lake and the Marvine lakes are well known, and the 
Marvine Hunting Lodge is a favorite resort of English 
tourists. 

Estes Park, some seventy miles from Denver, a favor- 
ite summer resort, is a long, narrow plateau of two or 
three miles in width and fifteen in length, a mile and a 
half above sea level, and enclosed in mountain walls that 
tower above the park from two to seven thousand feet. 
A swift stream, well stocked with trout, runs through the 
park. The four great systems of parks divide Colorado 
into naturally distinct localities : North Park, with an 
area of twenty-five hundred square miles ; Middle Park, 
with its three thousand ; the smaller South Park of one 
thousand; and San Luis, with over ninety-four hundred 
square miles, — all, in the aggregate, presenting a unique 
structural plan. Every journey in Colorado has its vista 
of surprise. No artist can paint its panoramas. Every 
traveller in this Land of Enchantment must realize that 
its exhilaration cannot be decanted in any form. It is a 
thing that lies in character, moulding life. 



156 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Colorado is the Land of Achievement. It offers re- 
sources totally unsurpassed in the entire world for an 
unlimited expanse. These resources await only the recog- 
nition of him who can discern the psychological moment 
for their development. That nothing is impossible to 
him who wills is one of the eternal verities, and even 
the expert census taker, or the supernatural tax collector 
whom nothing escapes, might search in vain, within 
the limits of the splendid Centennial State, for any 
man who fails to will. The resplendence of this state of 
stars and sunshine is due to this blaze of human energy. 
The Coloradoans are the typical spirits who are among 
those elect 

"... who shall arrive 
Prevailing still ; 
Spirits with whom the stars connive 
To work their will." 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 157 



CHAPTER V 

THE COLORADO PIONEERS 

" Around the man who seeks a noble end 
Not angels, but divinities attend." 

" In the deep heart of man a poet dwells 
Who all the day of life his summer story tells ; 
Scatters on every eye dust of his spells. 
Scent, form, and color : to the flowers and shells 
Wins the believing child with wondrous tales ; 
Touches a cheek with colors of romance, 
And crowds a history into a glance; 
Gives beauty to the lake and fountain, 
Spies over-sea the fires of the mountain; 
When thrushes ope their throat, H is he that sings. 
And he that paints the oriole's fiery toings. 
The little Shakespeare in the maidens heart 
Makes Romeo of a plough-boy on his cart ; 
Opens the eye to Virtue's starlike meed 
And gives persuasion to a gentle deed.'''' 

Emerson 

Not even the starry splendor of Colorado skies or the 
untold magic of the atmosphere vibrating with unwritten 
music, pictorial with such scenes as no artist ever put on 
canvas ; not even the scientific achievements in feats of 
civil and electrical engineering ; not even any advance- 
ment of the arts and the development of industries, 
commerce, or economics that bring the general life into 



158 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

increasing harmony with the physical environment, — 
none of these things, important and significant as they 
are, touch the profoundest interest of Colorado. For this 
supreme interest is that of the noble men and women 
whose lives have left to the state the legacy of their hopes, 
their efforts, their earnestness, and their faith. 4< Much is 
made of the Pilgrim Fathers who landed on Plymouth 
Rock," editorially remarked the " Denver Republican " in 
an article on " Pioneers' Day," in June of 1906 ; " and if 
there had been phonographs in those days to preserve the 
record of the speech of one of those old fugitives from 
European persecution, with what delight the men and 
women of this generation would listen to the tones which 
come from the instrument ! But, after all, were the Pil- 
grim Fathers, canonized by nearly three hundred years 
of tradition, any braver, any more venturesome, any more 
worthy of honor, than the pioneers who fought Indians 
and struggled against adverse fortune of every kind while 
they laid in fear and hope the foundations of this great 
state?" 

Among the poems of Walt Whitman is one entitled 
" The Beginners," which interprets a high quality of life. 
The lines are as follows : 

" How they are provided for upon the earth (appearing at intervals) : 
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth : 

How they inure to themselves as much as to any — what a paradox 
appears this age : 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 159 

How people respond to them, yet know them not : 
How there is something relentless in their fate, all times : 
How all things mischoose the object of their adulation and reward, 
And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same 
great purchase. " 

The price was paid by the pioneers of Colorado. They 
poured out lavishly all their hope, their indomitable 
energy, their patience, which was faith, as well. They 
planted, knowing that not to themselves would come the 
harvest. They builded that those yet to come might have 
shelter. They gave to Colorado such an endowment of 
potent but invisible force that its momentum pervades 
the air to-day. The accelerated ratio of power with which 
spiritual forces proceed defies even the ablest of the 
statisticians. 

In all the chapters of American history there are none 
more thrilling than the story of the early life in Colorado ; 
there are no chapters that more vividly demonstrate the 
absolutely present and practical aid of the divine guid- 
ance of God acting through His messengers, — those who 
have lived on earth and have gone on into the life more 
abundant. 

The lives of the remarkable men and women who have 
been canonized by the church have left the world the better 
for their being and humanity the richer for the inheritance 
of their experience. Their history is not to be held merely 
as tradition or as superstition. Let one visit in Italy 
Assisi, the home of St. Francis; Siena, the home of St. 



160 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Catherine, and follow the footsteps of others whose names 
enrich the church calendar, to their homes and haunts, and 
their record becomes vivid and vitalized as, to a stranger 
visiting Boston, might become the footsteps of her noble 
and consecrated lives which are yet almost within univer- 
sal personal remembrance : the lives of Lydia Maria Child, 
William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Whittier, Lucy Stone, 
Lowell, Mary A. Livermore, James Freeman Clarke, and 
Phillips Brooks, — men and women whom Boston may 
well hold as her prophets and her saints. They, too, 
were of the order of " The Beginners." They sowed the 
seeds of the higher life. They were receptive to all high 
counsels from the ethereal world, from the divine realms ; 
they listened to great truths which the multitude did not 
hear, and they gave it anew by voice and by pen, till all 
the world might hear and read and receive it. They were, 
indeed, — 

" God's prophets of the Beautiful." 
Such persons were living a twofold life during their entire 
earthly pilgrimage, and we may well recall their lives and 
link them with those of the great and the holy men and 
women of all ages and all climes. 

The pathfinders of human progress do not live for per- 
sonal ease, — 

" The hero is not fed on sweets." 

These are royal natures, who come into the world not to 
enjoy ease and prosperity, but who bring with them the 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 161 

high destiny of sacrifice. Their lives are companioned 
with struggle and conflict. Of such experiences as theirs 
well might be asked the question so impressively conveyed 
in these noble lines by America's great woman poet, — 
our poet who sang the song of the nation's " Battle- 
Hymn," — Julia Ward Howe : 

" What hast thou for thy scattered seed, 

O Sower of the plain ? 
Where are the many gathered sheaves 

Thy hope should bring again ? " 
" The only record of my work 

Lies in the buried grain." 

" O Conqueror of a thousand fields ! 

In dinted armor dight, 
What growths of purple amaranth 

Shall crown thy brow of might ? " 
" Only the blossom of my life 

Flung widely in the fight. " 

" What is the harvest of thy saints, 

O God ! who dost abide ? 
Where grow the garlands of thy chiefs 

In blood and sorrow dyed ? 
What have thy servants for their pains ? " 
" This only — to have tried." 

These Shining Ones are on earth to serve as co-workers 
with the divine power; to serve through good fortune or 
ill fortune ; through evil report or good report, — still to 
serve ; still to follow The Gleam. These are the men who 

"... make the world within their reach 
Somewhat the better for their being 
And gladder for their human speech." 
11 



162 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

The names of many of these heroic pioneers of Colorado 
may be unwritten save in the pages of the Recording 
Angel ; but they live and are immortal in the influence 
they have left as a heritage to succeeding generations, 
in the trains of thought and purposes they initiated, and 
in all that potent power of generous aims and noble 
ideals, — for all advancing civilization rests on lofty ideals. 
" While the basis of civilization must be material,™ says 
the Rev. Dr. Charles Gordon Ames of Boston, "its life 
must be spiritual. Its end and object must be the soul, 
and not the body ; and it will provide all best things for 
the body, that the soul may be worthily housed and 
served. The higher and chief interests of society will 
always be intellectual, affectional, aspirational — human 
and humane. The true, the beautiful, and the good — 
almost unknown to the barbarian, and often mocked at by 
the Philistines of modern society — will be sought for as 
men seek for gold and pearls of great price. Wealth will 
bring its offering to the altars of education and art and 
worship. Science, as it searches the worlds of matter and 
of mind, will find new and sacred parables and gospels of 
grace. Learning will be a priestess of truth. The im- 
agination of man will wander and wander in the wide 
creation, free, fearless, and glad, knowing that the Father's 
house is everywhere, and that his child may be everywhere 
at home.™ 

In many of the pioneer households of Colorado, whether 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 1Q3 

those of plenty or of privation, the children had the ines- 
timable advantage of the refined and beautiful atmosphere 
of a home in which high ideals and lofty devotion to in- 
tellectual progress and spiritual culture prevailed. If 
schools were insufficient, there were the trained educational 
methods of both the father and the mother under which 
they were reared and taught ; and poverty of purse cannot 
greatly matter where there is no poverty of the spirit. 

Well may these pioneers of Colorado be held as belong- 
ing to that order of humanity which the poet calls " The 
Beginners." Some of them were unlettered and untaught 
save in the great school of life itself; some of them were 
rich in learning and culture ; but they all shared in common 
a devotion to progress differing only in degree or concep- 
tion : they shared common sacrifices ; they gave their best 
energies to the development of a great and beautiful state 
whose increasing rate of progress is to them an immortal 
monument. These leaders of humanity whom the poet so 
finely characterizes as " The Beginners " are an order of 
people always appearing on earth. They are of those 
who hear the Song in the air and behold the Star in the 
sky. They are the persons who discern — and follow — 
The Gleam. Their lives are rich in service and sacrifice. 
Their kingdom is not of this world. Their lives are not 
unfrequently cheerless and cold, but on their altar fires 
glows the living coal sent down from heaven. They fast 
that others may feast. They accept privations that others 



164 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

may revel in possessions. They pay the inexorable price 
for the same great purchase. They are those who are sent 
on earth peculiarly set apart to co-operate with God in the 
larger fulfilment of the divine laws. They pay the inex- 
orable price of toil and labor and sorrow and sacrifice. 
They rise into the everlasting triumph and the beauty and 
the joy of spirituality of life. They give all for this ; they 
find all in it. But let no one resign his hopes or his 
dreams. Let no one doubt, for an instant, that all of 
goodness and beauty and sweetness and joy that he longs 
for is on its way toward him. It is only a question of 
time. Let him be patient, which is not a mere passive and 
negative condition, but one full of intense activities and 
serene poise ; let him be patient and believing, and make 
room in his life for that immortal joy which no man taketh 
from him. 

The town of Greeley, with its felicitous location mid- 
way between the two state capitals, Denver and Cheyenne, 
fifty miles from each, and which is already the principal 
town of Northern Colorado as Pueblo is of the southern 
part of the state, has a romantic and thrilling story 
connected with its founding. In the history of Colorado, 
among the many men whose lives stand out in noble pre- 
eminence, was that of the founder of Greeley, Hon. Nathan 
Cook Meeker, whose personal life is inseparably associated 
with the interesting town which owes to him its origin. 

The Meekers trace their ancestry to men who went to 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 165 

England from Antwerp about 1500. In 1639 Robert 
and William Meeker came to this country and settled 
in New Haven. Thirty years later William Meeker re- 
moved to New Jersey, and the town of Elizabeth was 
founded by him and named for his wife. He was a 
leader in the affairs of the day, held prominent office, and 
in 1690 he died, leaving the old Meeker homestead in 
Newark, New Jersey, which is still in the possession of 
his descendants. One of his sons was Joseph Meeker, also 
prominent in promoting the conditions of progress, and 
he was the grandfather of Nathan Cook Meeker, the foun- 
der of Greeley, who inherited the qualities that have made 
the family a marked one in America. When he was but 
seventeen he carried on an extensive correspondence with 
Henry Clay, John Tyler, George D. Prentice, and other 
noted men of the day, discussing with them subjects of 
importance, and he was a contributor even in these early 
years to the " Louisville Journal," then edited by George 
D. Prentice, and now the " Courier-Journal," edited by 
the brilliant Colonel Henry Watterson ; to the New Or- 
leans " Picayune, 1 ' and other leading papers. Even in his 
early youth Mr. Meeker seems to have been a man of per- 
petual aspiration and honorable ambition carried out to 
achievement, and by means of his own energy and per- 
sistence he graduated in 1840 from Oberlin College, 
became a teacher, and later (for literary work was his 
dominant gift) became a regular contributor to the M New 



166 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

York Mirror,'' 1 edited by N. P. Willis, the poet, and the 
most brilliant man of letters of his day. Mr. Meeker 
wrote both prose and poetry, — essays, romance, and 
verse alike flowing from his facile pen. He is the author 
of three books, one of which he dedicated to President 
Pierce, and which is in the Boston Public Library among 
the choice and rare works not allowed for general cir- 
culation but kept intact for the special use of scholars 
and researchers. He became one of the leading writers of 
the day on sociology, advancing many ideas which are 
to-day maintained by thoughtful students of the ques- 
tions involved in this subject. 

Founding towns seemed to " run in the family, 1 ' and 
even as his great-grandfather founded the town of 
Elizabeth, New Jersey, so Nathan Cook Meeker felt the 
impulse to stamp his own strong and progressive indi- 
viduality on new communities. He became the secretary 
and librarian (in 1844) of the Ohio Trumbull Phalanx, a 
colony founded to realize in practical form the theories 
of Fourier, and somewhat similar to the famous Brook 
Farm experiment. Mr. Meeker also co-operated in found- 
ing the Western Reserve Institute, of which, many years 
afterward, Hon. James A. Garfield became president. 

About this time he married Arvilla Delight, a daugh- 
ter of Levi Smith of Connecticut and a descendant of 
Elder Brewster ; a woman whose singular force, exaltation, 
and beauty of character may be traced through a notable 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 167 

New England ancestry. The family soon removed to 
the Western Reserve in Ohio. Mrs. Meeker had been 
known in her sweet girlhood as the beauty of the town. 
She was a woman of exceptional refinement and culture ; 
for many years a teacher, and, more than all, of a spirit- 
uality of character that added to her life its dignity and 
grace. 

The spell of destiny, the burden always laid upon " The 
Beginners,' 1 seemed to be on Nathan Cook and Arvilla 
Delight Meeker ; for no history of the work of the hus- 
band could be written that did not include that of the 
wife. Like Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, their lives 
were conjoined in that perfect mutual response of spiritual 
sympathy which alone makes the mystic marriage a divine 
sacrament. 

Horace Greeley became interested in Mr. Meeker's work 
and invited him to a place on the editorial staff of " The 
Tribune," a position which he filled with conspicuous 
ability for several years ; but in common with all ideal- 
ists, Mr. Meeker was haunted and beset by his visions of 
a more Utopian future for humanity. A Colorado jour- 
nal, recently giving some reminiscences of the life of its 
great citizen, said : 

"In the fall of 1869 Mr. Meeker made a trip to the West 
for the ' Tribune/ writing interesting letters by the way. 
On his return to New York he was full of the idea of estab- 



168 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

lishing a colony in Colorado. He mentioned his ambition to 
John Russell Young, who talked it over with Mr. Greeley, 
and that great man, at the first opportunity, said to the re- 
turned correspondent : ' I understand you wish to lead a 
colony to Colorado.' When Mr. Meeker answered ' Yes/ 
Greeley added, 'I think it would be a great success. Go 
ahead ; " The Tribune " will stand by you/ 

" With such encouragement Mr. Meeker spent the follow- 
ing day in writing the article announcing his purpose and 
outlining the plan which was afterwards adopted as the con- 
stitution of the colony. Mr. Greeley suggested a few minor 
changes, after which the article was printed and kept in type 
for a week, in order, as its author said, ' that there might 
be due reflection and no haste.' It was published in the 
* Tribune' of December 14, 1869, with an editorial indorse- 
ment of the plan and its originator. Nine days later the 
colony was organized, and yet in that short time more than 
a thousand letters had been received in answer to the 
article. On the 15th of the next April the certificate of 
organization of ' The Union Colony of Greeley ' was filed 
for record." 

In less extended detail some outline of the life of the 
founder of Greeley, the " Garden City " of Colorado, has 
already been narrated by the writer in a previous book ; 1 
but no adequate reference can be made to the state in 
which Mr. Meeker's life and work remains as so remark- 

1 The Life Radiant : Little, Brown, & Company, 1903. 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 169 

able a contribution and so fundamental a factor, which 
does not present in full the story of his relation to its 
development ; and the matter is thus presented even at 
the risk of some minor repetitions. 

In the spring of 1870 Mr. Meeker led his colony to 
Colorado. The colonists wished to give the town the name 
of its founder, but he himself insisted that it should bear 
the name of Greeley, after the great editor of the " Trib- 
une," of whose staff he was still a member. Into all 
the sacrifice and the hardships of this pioneer life Mrs. 
Meeker, a woman gently born and bred, entered with the 
utmost heroism. From the very inception the undertak- 
ing was a signal success. But Mr. Meeker conceived of 
still another extension of his activities in the problem 
then so prominently before the country, — the civilization 
of the Indians. He was appointed agent of the northern 
Utes, in possession of the great park region of the Rocky 
Mountains, on White River. To it he went in the same 
spirit in which General Armstrong entered on his work at 
Hampton. He had matured certain theories regarding 
the proper treatment of the Indians, in bringing them 
within the pale of the civilized arts, — theories so wise, so 
just, so humane, that they might be studied with advan- 
tage. These theories he put to the test. His youngest 
daughter, a beautiful and gifted girl, opened a free school 
for teaching the Indians. His wife united with him in 
every kindly and gracious act by which he strove to win 



170 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the confidence of the race. This kindness and gentleness 
was unmeasured. The family lived a life of constant sac- 
rifice and effort for the education and training of the Utes. 
But the Indian nature is one that wreaks its revenge, — 
not necessarily on the aggressor, but on the first comer. 
Other agents had been lax, and a number of causes of dis- 
content to which allusion cannot here be made fanned the 
smouldering fire. Their chief complaints were that they 
were required to work, and to abandon a bit of pasturage, 
only a few acres, for the new agency grounds and gardens. 
Events drew on like the fates in a Greek tragedy, and on 
the morning of September 29, 1879, Mr. Meeker was 
cruelly massacred. 

The little town of Meeker marks the site of the 
Meeker massacre. Here is a little village of a thousand 
inhabitants, located on White River, among the most beau- 
tiful of the mountain ranges, — the location being very 
much like that of Florence, in Italy, — which is the centre 
of a very rich agricultural and grazing region. Meeker is 
now forty-five miles from a railroad, the nearest station 
being Rifle, on the Denver and Rio Grande, a few miles 
from Glen wood Springs ; but the Moffet road brings to 
it railroad connection with Denver. There is an exten- 
sive stage line of over one hundred miles, starting from 
Rifle and going on through Meeker up into the moun- 
tains, where the hunting attracts a great number of 
travellers, and especially many Englishmen. It is in 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 171 

this region that President Roosevelt's happy hunting- 
grounds lie, and he is a familiar and favorite figure in 
Meeker. 

There is a little gray-stone Episcopal church among 
other churches that adorn this town, which has laid out a 
handsome park and which has the perpetual adornment of 
the beautiful river that flows through it. The mountains 
about supply streams that make irrigation easy, and the 
great fields of wheat, potatoes, and alfalfa are fertile and 
prosperous. Irrigation makes it everywhere possible to 
control the climatic conditions. 

Meeker is the county seat of Rio Blanco County, in 
which uranium has been discovered in two different 
places; and two oil wells, each at a cost of four thousand 
dollars, a creamery, costing nearly six thousand dollars, 
and water-works at a cost of sixty thousand dollars, have 
been established within the past two years. Fifteen res- 
ervoirs and eighty miles of irrigation ditches were con- 
structed in 1905, and in that year was harvested, in this 
county, a quarter of a million bushels of wheat, oats, and 
rye. 

The basis on which Greeley was founded is thus out- 
lined in the official documents drawn up by Nathan 
Cook Meeker : 

" I propose to unite with proper persons in the establish- 
ment of a Union colony in Colorado territory. A location 
which I have seen is well watered with streams and springs ; 



172 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

there are beautiful pine groves, the soil is rich, the climate 
healthful, grass will keep stock the year round, coal and 
stone are plentiful, and a well-travelled road runs through 
the property." 

Mr. Meeker proceeded to note the cost of the land, — 
eighteen dollars for every one hundred and sixty acres, — 
and he especially called attention — for he had the poet's 
eye — to the grandeur of the Rocky Mountain scenery, and 
he added : 

" The persons with whom I would be willing to associate 
must be temperance men and ambitious to establish good soci- 
ety, and among as many as fifty, ten should have as much as 
ten thousand dollars each, or twenty should have five thou- 
sand dollars each, while others may have from two hundred 
dollars to one thousand dollars and upward. For many to go 
so far without means could only result in disaster." 

The practical wisdom of this clause will be appreciated. 
The true idealist is the most practical and wisest of coun- 
sellors. It is only false idealism that leads to destruction. 
Mr. Meeker's idea was to make the settlement a village, 
with ample building lots, and then to apportion to each 
family from forty to one hundred and sixty acres outside 
for agriculture. 

On such a basis as this the Union Colony of Greeley was 
founded. A constitution was adopted that is a model of 
the condensation of the duties of good citizenship. In- 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 173 

dustry, temperance, education, and religion were the pillars 
on which the superstructure was raised. It is little wonder 
that the social quality of Greeley to-day — thirty -six 
years after its inauguration as a community — is of the 
highest type and exceptional among all the cities of the 
United States. 

Irrigation was the first necessity. A canal thirty miles 
long was dug, costing sixty thousand dollars. The Cache 
la Poudre was first examined and then tapped to furnish 
water. The elevation of the surrounding high bluffs se- 
cured the needed descent for the flow of water. The life 
began. 

Greeley is now a town of some seven thousand inhab- 
itants ; the seat of the State Normal College, which its 
president, Dr. Z. X. Snyder, has made one of the great 
educational institutions, not only of Colorado, but of the 
United States ; a college that draws students from almost 
every section, even from New England, so able is President 
Snyder's course of instruction and so admirable are the 
opportunities it affords for subsequent connection with 
the fine public school system in Colorado. A position 
in any of these offers a higher salary than can be ob- 
tained in the East, to say nothing of many other advan- 
tages associated with the work. Dr. Snyder was one of 
the eminent educators of the East ; and when some six- 
teen years since he accepted his present responsible office, 
he brought to it the best traditions of Eastern culture 



174 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

and united them with the zeal and freedom and infinite 
energy of the West. The Normal campus of forty acres 
on high ground, overlooking the town, with President 
Snyder s residence in the grounds and other college build- 
ings near, comprise a beautiful feature of Greeley. The 
western view, both from the college and from the home 
of President and Mrs. Snyder, over the mountain range 
including Long's Peak, is one of almost incomparable 
beauty. The faculty of the State Normal comprises thirty 
specialists; there is a library of thirty thousand vol- 
umes ; the laboratory has the latest scientific equipment 
of the day ; the art department and the music course are 
admirably conducted ; French, German, and Italian are 
taught according to the latest language methods ; and 
athletics, domestic science, nature studies, all receive due 
recognition. The " Training School " of the State Nor- 
mal College has an attendance of nearly five hundred, and 
the graduates of this institution begin work on salaries 
ranging from five hundred to twenty-five hundred dol- 
lars annually. The tuition is free to all citizens of 
Colorado. 

The many churches, the excellent public schools, the 
clubs and societies for social enjoyment and improvement, 
indicate the high quality of life in Greeley. There are 
three newspapers ; and of these the " Greeley Tribune," 
founded by Mr. Meeker and now under the able editor- 
ship of Mr. C. H. Wolfe, has created for itself more than 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 175 

a local reputation. Financially, Greeley stands well, with 
its several banks and its solidity of resources. 

There is hardly a shabby house to be found in all 
the town, whether of residence or business. Every build- 
ing has a neat and thrifty aspect, and the art of archi- 
tecture has been especially studied, for almost without 
exception every house, whether large or small, is tasteful 
and attractive. A bay window is thrown out here, a little 
balcony there, a piazza, a loggia, an oriel window, and the 
eye is gratified. But, besides this dainty and tasteful 
architecture, the one great feature of Greeley is her beau- 
tiful streets. These are due directly to the taste and 
the direction of the founder, Mr. Meeker. The streets 
are one hundred feet wide, lined invariably — every street 
in the town — with a double row of shade trees, giving 
coolness, beauty, and contributing much to the modifica- 
tion of the temperature. Every deed granted in Greeley 
forbids the sale of any intoxicating liquor. There is not 
a saloon in the place. There is not a loafer or a crim- 
inal, nor are there any poor in the unfortunate sense of 
the large cities. No police are needed. The jail is 
locally known as a mere ornamental appendage to the 
fine forty thousand dollar courthouse. 

For many years it has been felt that some expression 
should be made in honor of the memory of the founder of 
Greeley, and this has now taken form in the project for 
the " Meeker Memorial Library," which is in preparation. 



176 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

The beautiful young city is itself, however, the best me- 
morial of its noble founder. It is a living monument of 
perpetually increasing greatness and beauty ; and who 
to-day can wander under the shade of the beautiful trees 
which in a double row line every street and boulevard — 
trees planted in 1870 under Mr. Meeker's personal 
superintendence — without hearing amid the rustle of 
their whispering leaves the poet's words, that fall like a 
benediction : 

" Be of good cheer, brave spirit ; steadfastly 
Serve that low whisper thou hast served ; for know, 
God hath a select family of sons 
Now scattered wide thro' earth, and each alone, 
Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one 
By constant service to that inward law, 
Is weaving the sublime proportions 
Of a true monarch's soul. Beauty and strength, 
The riches of a spotless memory, 
The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got 
By searching of a clear and loving eye 
That seeth as God seeth. These are their gifts, 
And Time, who keeps God's word, brings on the day 
To seal the marriage of these minds with thine, 
Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be 
The salt of all the elements, world of the world." 

The glamour of romance can never fade from Colorado, 
whose entire history is one of heroic deeds and splendid 
energy ; but the primitive stage of the state is already left 
far behind with the nineteenth century. In its intellectual 
and scientific development the years of the twentieth cen- 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 177 

tury have almost exceeded its twenty-four years of life as 
a state in the nineteenth. The tide of immigration still 
continues, but from being the objective point of mining 
activities where fortune hunters rushed to find a royal road 
to riches, it is now a state of agriculture and of commerce. 
Social conditions are thus altered ; and though some of 
these conditions are those of mining regions, as in the 
Cripple Creek district, they have altered from the typical 
Bret Harte mining-camp life to those of orderly progress, 
— to the life dominated by twentieth-century ideals of 
humanity ; the life whose framework is seen in public- 
school systems, in religious observance, in the liberal 
reading of periodical and other literature, and in the 
maintenance of public libraries as a necessity in every 
community. 

The dawn of literary and artistic development in Colo- 
rado is very evident, — a dawn that is already of such 
radiant promise as to forecast the day when this state shall 
contribute to our greatest national literature. A large 
number of individual writers could already be named 
whose work in books, magazine articles, and excellent 
journalism might well be held as typical of the best cul- 
ture of the entire country. The first wild turmoil of a 
new and richly varied state has given way to a prosperous, 
progressive commonwealth. Material progress must still 
always precede the higher growth, yet the air is vital with 
ideas, and the vision of Colorado is always toward the 



178 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

stars. The beauty and majesty of the environment cannot 
but react upon the people. The growth of women's clubs 
has been one steady factor of progress, with most favorable 
effect on all the general life of intellectual and moral 
advancement. The public libraries in every centre estab- 
lish and develop the reading habit. While a love for 
beauty is an element in human life, the influence of the 
transcendent majesty and incomparable sublimity of the 
Colorado scenery will continue to prove a source of inspi- 
ration to the mental and moral life of the people. The 
changing colors of the mountains are a constant delight. 
Colorado offers a perpetual feast of beauty. Her resources 
are infinite. Colorado combines all the exaltation of the 
untried with an abundance of the conveniences and luxuries 
of the older civilization ; and of this Centennial State it is 
difficult to record facts and statistics that do not seem to 
suggest the tales of a thousand nights. With resources 
and with scenic loveliness which no language could exag- 
gerate, it is still only to those who themselves know and 
appreciate the grandeur of this state that any interpreta- 
tion of it will appear as rather within than as at all 
beyond the limits of the most statistical and demonstrable 
facts. The East has already outgrown the tradition that 
the entire trans-Mississippi region is a howling wilderness. 
Colorado is no longer as vague as is Calcutta to the aver- 
age mind. Dr. Edward Everett Hale exclaimed that he 
desired his sons to know that there was something in the 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 179 

world besides Beacon Street, and this ambition has of late 
years become too prevalent to leave even the extreme 
East in any absolute and total ignorance of the wonderful 
West. Still it may be true that the flying visions from 
Pullman-car windows are marvellously extended and inten- 
sified by increasing familiarity with the almost incredibly 
swift progress of this region. 

A typical illustration of the fallibility of human judg- 
ment is seen in the attitude taken in 1838 by the great 
Daniel Webster on the floor of the United States Senate 
against an appropriation for a post route west of the 
Missouri River. 

"What do we want," said he, "of this vast worthless 
area, — this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, 
shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie 
dogs ? To what use could we ever hope to put these great 
deserts, or these endless mountain ranges, impregnable and 
covered to their base with eternal snow ? What use have 
we for such a country ? Mr. President, I will never vote 
one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast 
one inch nearer Boston than it is to-day." 

It is a far cry from this " vast worthless area," as Mr. Web- 
ster termed it in 1838, to the grand and richly promising 
state of to-day, with its splendid young cities where art and 
science unite with literature and ethics in the rapid develop- 
ment of social progress ; with its mountain ranges climbed 
in palace cars ; its electric transit and electric lighting ; its 



180 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

vivid and forceful achievements, that even in each decade 
concentrate the progress of a century, as seen in the past. 

It is not a mere vagary, but rather a practical and 
momentous fact, that Colorado is peculiarly the realm 
receptive to invisible potencies and mental impressions. 
Science is now confronted with the question as to whether 
thought and electricity may be identified as the same force 
under different degrees of manifestation. "There is an 
elemental essence — a strange living force — which sur- 
rounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible 
to the influence of human thought,'' says an English sci- 
entist, and he continues : "This essence responds with the 
most wonderful delicacy to the faintest action of our minds 
or desires ; and this being so, it is interesting to note how it 
is affected when the human mind formulates a definite 
thought or desire." All the significance of a thousand 
years may be concentrated in an instant's thought, as 
all the heat stored up in all the forests of the world is 
concentrated in a small quantity of radium. Emerson 
embodies this truth in the stanza : 

" His instant thought a poet spoke, 
And filled the age his fame ; 
An inch of ground the lightning strook 
But lit the sky with flame. " 

It is intensity, not duration, that is of consequence, and 
that determines results. To state that there is something 
in the Colorado air that incites active and lofty thought ; 



THE COLORADO PIONEERS 181 

that uplifts the soul and enables one to discern the prac- 
tical processes for identifying the most marvellous scenic 
grandeur of the civilized world with the most advanced 
processes of applied industries, is to state a simple fact. 
Phillips Brooks once said : 

" I know no ideal humanity that is not filled and pervaded 
with the superhuman. God in man is not unnatural, but the 
absolutely natural. That is what the incarnation makes us 
know. . . . The truths of heaven and the truths of earth are 
in perfect sympathy. . . . The needs of human nature are 
supreme, and have a right to the divinest help." 

The early explorers and pioneers in Colorado felt this 
truth, so finely stated by Bishop Brooks, even if they did 
not formulate it in words. The apparently insuperable 
obstacles of a land where the desert disputed the space 
with the Titanic mountain ranges piled against the sky, 
incited them to effort rather than paralyzed their energy. 
It is fitting that this most ideal state, rich in resources of 
almost undreamed-of variety and importance, should pre- 
sent a significant object lesson in the working out of 
the problem involved in the higher civilization of the 
twentieth century. The future of Denver, of Pueblo, 
Colorado Springs, Greeley, and other important centres, 
is a most important part of the future of the nations. 
The Star of high destiny shines on the Centennial State. 



182 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 

" But my minstrel knows and tells 
The counsel of the gods, 
Knows of Holy Book the spells, 
Knows the law of Night and Day, 

What sea and land discoursing say 
In sidereal years. " 

Emerson 

New Mexico is the scene of surprises. Traditionally sup- 
posed to be a country that is as remote as possible from 
the accepted canons of polite society ; that is also an arid 
waste whose temperature exceeds the limits of any well- 
regulated thermometer, — it reveals itself instead as a 
region whose temperature is most delightful, whose color- 
ing of sky and atmosphere is often indescribably beau- 
tiful, and whose inhabitants include their fair proportion 
of those who represent the best culture and intelligence of 
our country. New Mexico has a mixed population. To 
a hundred and sixty thousand Americans there are a hun- 
dred and twenty-five thousand of Spanish or Mexican de- 
scent; a few hundred Chinese and Japanese, and some 
thirteen thousand Indians, who are, however, peaceful and 







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SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 183 

industrious, and a proportion of whom have been educated 
in the Government schools for the Indians. 

The altitude of New Mexico seldom falls to less than 
five thousand feet, so that the air is cool and exhilarating. 
The rock formations partake of the same rich hue that 
characterizes those in Colorado and in Arizona, and as the 
soil is rich there is a continual play of color. The scenery 
is one changeful, picturesque panorama of mountains, rock, 
or walled canons, vast mesas, uncanny buttes, and lava fields 
left by some vanished volcanic fires. The ancient Indian 
pueblos are still largely inhabited, and strange ruins of un- 
known civilizations add their atmosphere of mystery. The 
mouldering remains of the old Pecos church and the 
strange communistic dwellings in the old Pueblo de Taos ; 
the ruins of the fortress and the seven circular mounds, 
which were the council-chambers and halls for mystic rites 
of the prehistoric civilization ; and the fabled site of the 
ancient Aztec city where tradition says Montezuma was 
born, — all contribute to a unique interest in this " land 
of the turquoise sky," as New Mexico is called. 

Acoma, the ancient pueblo perched on a perpendicular 
precipice four hundred feet high, with its terraced dwell- 
ings of adobe, its gigantic church, its reservoir cut out of 
solid rock, and its inhabitants with their strange customs, 
is fairly accessible to the traveller from Albuquerque by a 
drive of some twenty miles. Mr. Lummis calls it " the 
most wonderful pueblo," and " the most remarkable city in 



184 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the world," as compared, of course, with other pueblos 
and ruined cities. Acoma has a present population of 
some four hundred Indians, and its romantic beauty of 
location is unparalleled. There are scientists who incline to 
believe that the original Acoma was built on the top of 
the Mesa Encanteda, — the " Enchanted Mesa, 1 ' — a sheer, 
precipitous rock seven hundred feet high which is now 
practically unscalable ; although Mr. R W. Hodge, of the 
Bureau of Ethnology, achieved this apparently impossible 
feat, and found what is, in his convictions, unmistakable 
evidence of human habitation, supporting the traditions 
regarding this colossal rock. Some mighty cataclasm of 
nature swept the approach away ; but if ever there were 
human habitations on the " Enchanted Mesa," the period 
is lost in prehistoric ages. 

The colossal church in Acoma is a striking feature. Its 
walls are ten feet in thickness and sixty feet high, and the 
church and yard in which it stands consumed forty years 
in their construction. It was only reached by rude stairs 
cut in the rock. Dim traditions, which are perhaps hardly 
more than speculative theory, suggest that these steps of 
approach were suddenly swept away by some convulsion of 
nature at a time when the men of this prehistoric pueblo 
were away hunting, or otherwise engaged in procuring 
means of sustenance, and that the women and children 
were thus cut off from all supplies and aid and left to 
starve. Mr. Lummis has a theory that seems to him 












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SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 185 

possible, if not probable, that there was a ledge of 
neighboring rocks which served as ladders to the Mesa 
Encanteda, and that these rocks were swept away by some 
frightful storm, or some sudden convulsion of nature, dur- 
ing the absence of the men ; and that a new city — the 
present Acoma — was then built on the lesser rock on 
which it now stands. Acoma was old even when Coro- 
nado, in 1540, made his expedition through the country, 
from which period the authentic history of New Mexico 
begins with the meagre records of the heroic friars and 
the memorials of the Spanish conquerors. Laguna, a 
pueblo founded in 1699, lies twenty miles from Acoma 
on the Santa Fe route, of which it is one of the interesting 
features. All these old Spanish missions, which are found 
in more or less degrees of preservation in all this chain 
of pueblos in the valley of the Rio Grande, contain an- 
cient paintings and statues of saints. Largely, the paint- 
ings are crude and worthless, but there exist those that 
have legitimate claim to art as the work of Spanish artists 
not unknown to fame. Among these is the painting of 
San Jose in the mission at Acoma, a painting presented 
by Charles II of Spain. This mission was founded bv 
Friar Ramirez, who dedicated it " To God, to the Roman 
Catholic Church, and to St. Joseph/' — who was the 
patron saint of this pueblo. 

There is an amusing legend that Laguna, submerged in 
all manner of disasters, looked on the prosperity of Acoma 



186 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

and ascribed it wholly to the influence of this picture of 
the saint before which the people made their daily adora- 
tions and laid their votive offerings. Laguna believed 
that San Jose would invest it with the same felicities 
enjoyed by the neighboring city, could they only secure 
the portrait, and their urgent plea to borrow it for a time 
was granted by Acoma. Their confidence in the saint was 
justified ; peace and plenty again smiled on Laguna, and 
they made their daily devotions before the great picture. 
At length, so runs the legend, Acoma reminded Laguna 
that a loan was not a gift, — to be held in perpetual fee, 
and demanded its return. The faithless people of Laguna 
declared it was their own, — and the case actually went 
into litigation and was tried in Court. Judge Kirby Bene- 
dict, after hearing all the evidence, decided in favor of 
Acoma, but the picture had mysteriously disappeared. The 
messengers sent from Acoma to bring the sacred treasure 
at last discovered it under a tree half-way between the two 
pueblos. They instantly recognized that the saint, re- 
joiced at the righteous decision, had started on his home- 
ward journey of his own volition. The last one of the 
Franciscan friars to minister in New Mexico was Padre 
Mariano de Jesus Lopez, whose work was in Acoma, the 
"city in the sky." Of all the cliff-built cities, Acoma 
is the most marvellous. Its terraced dwellings seem, as 
Mr. Lummis so graphically says, to be "the castles of 
giants," for " the lapse of ages has carved the rocks into 



I 




SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 187 

battlements, buttresses, walls, columns, and towers, and 
the view from this cloud-swept city is one never to be 
forgotten. On this cliff the sand rises and falls like the 
billows of the sea." 

No latter-day interest of contemporary life, either in 
the romantic scenery or the potential development of New 
Mexico, can exceed the richness of its prehistoric past 
and the marvels of this ancient civilization that yet remain. 
Alluding to these wonderful monumental remains, Colonel 
Max Frost, of Santa Fe, who knows his territory in every 
aspect of its life and its attractions, says : 

" The Pajarito Cliff-dwellers' Park, the Chaco Canon, the 
Gila Canon, western Valencia and Socorro counties abound in 
cliff and communal buildings, the age of which has puzzled 
scientists, but which are older than any other ruins on the 
American continent, and probably in the world. The most 
accessible cliff-dwellers' region is the Pajarito Park, only one 
day's overland trip from Santa Fe or Espafiola, in which 
twenty thousand cliff-dwellings and caves are situated within 
a comparatively small area. The scenery of this natural park 
is superb ; ' wonderful ' is the only adjective that will do 
justice to the caves in the cliffs, high and inaccessible almost 
as eagles' nests, but showing many other signs of occupation 
besides the peculiar picture writings in the soft volcanic tufa 
of which the cliffs are composed. In addition to the cliffs, 
there are remains of communal buildings of later occupation, 
some of them containing as high as twelve hundred rooms. 



188 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

There are also burial mounds with remains of ancient pottery. 
Along the eastern foot of this steep plateau flows the Rio 
Grande and lie the villages of San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and 
San Juan, while to the west rise the stupendous mountain 
masses of the Valles, the Cochiti and Jemez ranges, with their 
deep forests and canons, their famous hot springs, their Indian 
villages, and their mines. Where else on earth is there so 
much of the beautiful in scenery, of romance, of historic 
monuments, of prehistoric remains, of the ancient, the unique, 
the picturesque, the sublime, to be found as within a radius 
of fifty miles of Santa Fe ? One day's trip will take the 
wanderer from the historic Old Palace and San Miguel Church 
in the City of the Holy Faith, over the foothills of the Sangre 
de Cristo range, from which rise in full view mountain peaks 
almost thirteen thousand feet high, into the picturesque 
Tesuque Valley and by the ancient Indian pueblo of Tesuque. 
The road winds through sandhills that the air and the rain 
have cut into grotesque shapes, huge as Titans and weird as 
the rock formations in the Garden of the Gods. Then come 
once more fertile fields and the village of Cuymungue, for- 
merly an Indian pueblo, now a native settlement. Along the 
Nambe River, with its grand falls, close by the Indian pueblo 
of Nambe to the pueblo of San Ildefonso on the Rio Grande ; 
then along that river through the laughing Espanola Valley, 
past the Black Mesa, a famous Indian battleground, into the 
large Indian pueblo of Santa Clara and its mission church to 
Santa Cruz, also with a quaint and ancient church building, 
threads the wagon road across the river into Espanola. From 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 189 

there the road ascends the wildly beautiful Santa Clara 
Canon, along a rippling trout stream up to the steep cliffs of 
the Puye and the Shufinne, with their hundreds and thou- 
sands of prehistoric caves and communal buildings. And all 
that in one day's journey overland ! If the trip be prolonged 
another day or tw r o, the remarkable hot springs at Ojo Caliente 
and the hot springs in the deep chasm of the Rio Grande at 
Wamsley's, the Indian pueblos of Picuris and Taos, the finest 
trout streams and best haunts of wild game, or the Jicarilla 
Indian Reservation, as well as busy lumber and mining camps, 
can be visited. And that is only in one direction from Santa 
Fe ! Going south, one day's trip will pass through the quaint 
settlements of Agua Fria, Cienega, and Cieneguilla, by the 
Tiffany turquoise mines, the old mining camp of Bonanza, the 
smelter at Cerrillos, the Ortiz gold placers, worked a hun- 
dred years before gold was discovered in California and still 
yielding gold dust and nuggets, the coal mines at Madrid, 
where bituminous and anthracite coal have been mined from 
the same hillside, the placer and gold mines of Golden and 
San Pedro, not to speak of sheep and cattle ranches and the 
beautiful sceneiy of the Cerrillos, Ortiz, San Pedro, and 
Sandia mountains. 

" Another trip of one day from Santa Fe will take the trav- 
eller by the pueblo ruins of Arroyo Hondo over Apache hill, 
the battlegrounds of Apache Springs, the interesting native 
settlement of Canoncito, over Glorieta Pass and the battle- 
field of Glorieta, to the upper Pecos River, by the ancient and 
historic Pecos church ruins, the village of Pecos, and through 



190 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the most beautiful summer-resort country in the Southwest, 
where trout streams babble in every canon and where from 
one summit can be surveyed the hoary heads of eleven of the 
twelve highest peaks in New Mexico. 

" Another day's trip out of Santa Fe will take the visitor 
up the rugged Santa Fe Cafion, by the large reservoir and the 
Aztec mineral springs to the Scenic Highway, which crosses 
the Santa Fe range into the upper Pecos Valley and unfolds 
at every step new mountain views and panoramas magnificent 
beyond description. Nor do these trips exhaust the interest- 
ing points in and about Santa Fe. Almost every other town 
in the territory offers sights and scenes of equal interest to 
the tourist and sightseer. 

"The prehistoric ruin of the Chaco Canon and Pueblo 
Bonito, in southeastern San Juan County, as well as those at 
Aztec, in the same county, are more fully excavated than 
those of the Pajarito Park, and in some respects are more 
palatial and more impressive. They can best be reached 
from Gallup or Thoreau on the Santa Fe Railway in McKinley 
County. 

"The prehistoric ruins on the Gila Forest Reserve, as well 
as those in western Valencia and Socorro counties, have not 
been thoroughly explored thus far, being distant from the 
highways of travel ; but on this very account they should 
have a special charm and attraction for the student of 
archaeology. 

" Coming to more recent, although still ancient days, the 
ruins of the Gran Quivira and of nearby abandoned pueblo 




CLIFF DWELLER RUINS, NEAR SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 




STONE TENT. CLIFF DWELLERS, NEW MEXICO 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 191 

villages, between the Jumanes Mesa and the Mai Pais and 
Jornado del Muerto, are of great historic interest. They are 
best reached from the station of Willard at the junction of 
the Santa Fe Central and Eastern Railway of New Mexico. 
Similar ruins are found in western Valencia, Socorro, and 
other counties, and divide the interest of the tourist with the 
many present-day Indian pueblos and Spanish settlements 
boasting of considerable antiquity. The Zuni, Navaho, 
Jicarilla, and Mescalero Indian reservations are well worthy 
a visit, and upon the first two named are many prehistoric 
ruins. 

" Foremost in interest and value in historic archaeology 
are the old mission churches of the Franciscans. In every 
occupied Indian pueblo and at the site of almost every 
abandoned pueblo, there is one of the monuments of those 
pioneers of Christianity and civilization, the Franciscan 
Fathers. Many of these are in a good state of preserva- 
tion, while others are in ruins, but every one is an object of 
historic interest. 

" The old mission church of San Diego, which is the oldest 
of the California missions, was founded in 1 769. It is almost 
a total ruin ; only the front remains in a good state of pres- 
ervation. The side walls are still standing, but no portions of 
the roof or interior remain. This is the most venerable and 
venerated historic monument in the state of California, and 
is annually visited by thousands of tourists. It has stood for 
one hundred and sixty-four years. It marks the beginning 
of civilization and Christianity in California. And yet, in 



192 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

New Mexico, on the upper Pecos, thirty-five miles west of 
Las Vegas, at the site of the abandoned Pueblo of Cicuye, are 
the ruins of the old Pecos church. The church is 
three hundred years old. It was nearly one hundred and 
fifty years old when the San Diego mission was founded. It 
was projected before the Spanish Armada was destroyed and 
antedates the coming of the Mayflower and the settlement 
of Jamestown. All that is said of the old Pecos church may 
be said of that of Jemez. They were built at the same time. 
The one at Gran Quivira was founded in 1630, and is a fairly 
well-preserved ruin. The churches at San Ildefonso and Santa 
Clara are in a complete state of preservation. They are nine 
years older than the oldest of the California ruins. The old 
San Miguel mission in Santa Fe has been rebuilt. Its walls 
date from 1650, the roof from 1694, or possibly a few years 
later. From the old church at Algodones was taken a bell, 
cast in Spain in 1356, and at the Cathedral at Santa Fe and 
other churches are ancient relics and art treasures of old 
Spanish and Italian masters. These are only a few examples 
selected at random from the large number of ancient churches 
of equally great interest scattered over New Mexico. In- 
scription Rock, on the old road to Zufii, and every one of the 
pueblos from Taos on the north to Isleta on the south, and 
from the Rio Grande pueblos in the central part to Zufii in 
the west, are worthy of a visit, both for historic and present- 
day interest. 

" Nor is there any other building in this country to com- 
pare in historic interest with the Old Palace at Santa Fe, 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 193 

which has been more to New Mexico than Faneuil Hall to 
Massachusetts or Liberty Hall to Pennsylvania, nor is there 
any other town in the United States which offers so much of 
interest to the tourist as the city of St. Francis d'Assisi." 

It is no exaggeration to say that in many respects the 
archaeological interest of New Mexico, its atmosphere, 
its historic color, is as distinctive as that of Egypt or of 
Greece, Italy, or Spain. When, on December 15, 1905, 
the first long-distance telephone in Santa Fe established 
communication viva voce with Denver, while within a 
radius of fifty miles, ruins of prehistoric civilization 
fascinated the tourist, — surely the remote past and the 
latest developments of the present met and mingled after 
the fashion of " blue spirits and gray." Very curiously 
mixed is the civilization of New Mexico. It can almost 
be said to lie in strata, like geologic testimony. The 
ancient peoples whose very name is lost, — shrouded in 
antiquity that has closed the chapters and refuses to turn 
the pages for the twentieth-century reader ; the Indian 
population ; the Spanish, whose explorers — Alvar Nunez, 
Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, Juan de Oiiate, and others — 
and whose missionaries, from the ranks of the Franciscan 
friars, brought to the savage land the first message 
of modern civilization ; and the American, which within 
almost the past half-century has established itself since 
that August day of 1846 when General Kearney floated 
the stars and stripes from the " Old Palace " in Santa Fe. 

13 



194 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

The American civilization and high enlightenment has 
poured itself into this " Land of the Sun King," — the 
" Land of the Turquoise Sky."" For now, as Colonel Frost 
has so ably and comprehensively noted, " New Mexico is 
strictly up to date in its government, in its hotels, its rail- 
road accommodations, in the protection the law affords, 
in its universities, colleges, public schools* sanitariums, 
charitable institutions, its progress, and in its prosperity. 
Churches are found in every settlement, newspapers in 
every town, together with fine stores, banking institu- 
tions, and every safety, comfort, and luxury that the 
centres of civilization of the East afford." If that vivid 
and inspiring group of the Muses, — the muse of His- 
tory, of Science, of Philosophy, and others, — painted by 
Puvis de Chavannes to adorn the court of the grand stair- 
way of rich Siena marble in the Public Library of 
Boston, — an achievement in modern art that alone 
would immortalize the great painter of France, — if 
these Muses could visit New Mexico, the specialty of each 
would be found. The richly historic past that has left 
its various records ; the present, that has impressed into 
its service every power of science, of engineering, of 
architectural construction, of agriculture, and of social 
progress, would furnish to each a vast field in its own 
especial domain. 

A work published in Paris somewhere about the middle 
of the nineteenth century, entitled " Memoires Historiques 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 195 

sur La Louisiane? — a book that has never been trans- 
lated, — gives an account of a French expedition in New 
Mexico in search of a mine of emeralds and their en- 
counter with the Spanish forces ; but although in this en- 
gagement the Spanish troops suffered disaster, the Spanish 
civilization still continues, while there is little permanent 
trace of the French in New Mexico. It is a curious 
fact, however, that the present continues this varied and 
strangely assorted grouping of races which characterized 
the country in its earliest days. 

New Mexico reminds one of Algiers. There is the same 
Oriental suggestion of intense coloring, of dazzling bril- 
liancy of sky, of gleaming pearl, of floating clouds. 

There is one feature of this trans-Continental trip 
which is of the first importance to the tourist, and this is 
the line of artistic and beautiful hotels built after the old 
mission design, the architecture felicitously harmonizing 
with the landscape, — those Harvey hotels built in con- 
nection with the Santa Fe stations at principal points, as 
at Trinidad, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and others, all chris- 
tened with Spanish names, — the " Cardenas, 1 "' the " Cas- 
taneda," the " Alvarado," — all of which are conducted 
with a perfection of cuisine and service that is rarely 
equalled. The social and the pictureque charm of the 
long journey is singularly enhanced by the leisurely stops 
made for refreshment ; the leaving the long train — with 
its two engines, one at either end — for the little exer- 



196 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

cise in fresh air gained by going into the dining-rooms ; 
being able to procure papers at the news stands, fruit, or 
other delicacies, and enjoying the scenery and gaining some 
knowledge of the place. In connection with the Alva- 
rado, at Albuquerque, are two buildings : one that offers 
a most interesting museum of Indian archaeological and 
ethnological collections, and the other showing native 
goods from Africa and the Pacific islands. Salesrooms 
connected with these enable the traveller to purchase any 
souvenir from a trifle, to the costly baskets, richly colored 
Navajo blankets, the strange symbolic pottery, or the 
objects of religious rites. 

A day's delay at Albuquerque enables the traveller to 
visit four interesting pueblos, — Santa Ana, Sandia, Lia, 
and Jemez, — in a day's stage ride between Jemez and 
Albuquerque. At all these important stations on the 
route the Santa Fe has established free reading-rooms for 
its employes, fitted up with every comfort. 

New Mexico, while partaking in the general fascina- 
tion that invests all the great Southwest, is especially 
not only a land of enchantment, but a land of oppor- 
tunities. It is a country of untold latent wealth, of un- 
calculated resources. There are vast tracts of soil that 
are ready for the cultivation they will so bountifully 
repay ; there are over three hundred mining districts, 
few of which are developed. Six million sheep are graz- 
ing upon its thousand hills, which would furnish raw 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 197 

material for a large number of woollen mills. The land 
is favorable for the culture of the sugar beet, and manu- 
factories for this product are needed. A local authority 
states that " the rubber plant is indigenous and mineral 
products are of such extent and variety that industries 
that need them for raw material, or incidentally in the 
process of manufacture, will find in this part of the 
United States a location much more favorable than most 
of the Eastern manufacturing centres. There exist large 
deposits of iron ore, fluxing material and fuel for furnaces, 
steel mills and smelters, and there are but few branches of 
manufacture which could not be established with profit 
in this part of the Southwest. Besides the raw material 
there are offered the water-power, the fuel, the cheap 
labor, special inducements, such as exemption from taxa- 
tion for the first five years and a low assessment there- 
after, favorable legislation, cheap building sites, railroad 
facilities, freedom from excessive competition, the increas- 
ing home demand of a growing commonwealth of vast 
resources, and proximity to the markets of Mexico and 
the Orient. . . . 

" Farmers are urged to come to till the fertile soil 
under the most favorable conditions, and with home 
markets that pay better prices than can be obtained any- 
where else. Only a quarter of a million of acres are under 
cultivation, and most of these only in forage plants or in 
products that demand little attention ; four times that 



198 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

area is immediately available for agricultural purposes. 
Not one-half of the flowing water is utilized, and not 
one-fiftieth of the flood water is stored. There are un- 
developed possibilities of farming by the Campbell or dry- 
soil method. New Mexico raises the finest fruit in the 
world, and every other crop that can be produced any- 
where in the temperate zone. Yet it imports annually 
millions of dollars'' worth of flour, alfalfa, hay, potatoes, 
fruit, garden produce, poultry, eggs, butter, cheese, honey, 
beef, pork, and other products of the farm and dairy that 
it can and should raise at home. Free lands, the finest 
climate in the world, irrigation, churches, schools, rail- 
road facilities, home markets, good prices, and extensive 
range, are all factors which help to make the life of the 
farmer and stock grower in New Mexico pleasant and 
prosperous." 

The visitor from the East enters New Mexico through 
a long tunnel ; and in Raton, a prosperous city of some 
eight thousand people located in the Raton Mountains, 
is found the centre of an enormous coal belt, and also a 
promising oil field. Raton is called the " Gate City." It 
exports ice of a very pure quality, the water being from 
a reservoir of a capacity of over fifty million gallons. The 
streets of Raton are graded and have electric lighting ; 
there is a fine park, long-distance telephonic connection 
with Colorado and New Mexican cities, and its schools 
and churches are numerous. A new Raton tunnel is now 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 199 

in process of construction by the Santa Fe line that will 
enter New Mexico through the mountains at a lower 
point. The work is being done by electric drills that 
offer a most interesting spectacle in their process. The 
tunnel will cost a million dollars. Most beautiful is the 
landscape and the coloring of air and sky between Raton 
and Las Vegas. The Cimarron range is silhouetted against 
the western sky ; picturesque points on the old Santa Fe 
trail are seen ; and Mora Canon, through which the jour- 
ney lies, has its romantic attractions. From the lofty 
plateau of Raton's Peak the deep, dark valley of Rio Las 
Animas Perdidas is disclosed ; the matchless Spanish 
Peaks, " Las Cumbres Espanolas," lift their heads into 
the blue sky ; Pike's Peak gleams like a monumental 
shaft in the clouds, and the Snowy Range, for more than 
two hundred miles, is within the luminous landscape. 

Las Vegas, the second city in importance in New Mexico, 
is a fascinating place. There are really three towns of 
Las Vegas — the old Spanish town, still retaining its an- 
cient convent and missions; the new, up-to-date Las 
Vegas, with its Castafieda Hotel — beautiful in the old 
Moorish architecture, with spacious piazzas and balconies ; 
and Las Vegas Hot Springs, connected by trolley cars. 
Thus there is the particular paradise of the invalid, or of 
those who take prevention rather than cure and a sunny 
winter in order not to be invalids ; for at Las Vegas Hot 
Springs, to which a branch railroad of this omnipresent 



200 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Santa Fe conveys the traveller — only six miles — the 
Hot Springs boil and bubble like the witches' caldron. 
Here the guests may immerse themselves in boiling 
mineral water, or lie all day in the sunshine, or whatever 
else they prefer; and the medicinal waters, internally 
and externally administered, are said to make one over 
altogether. Rheumatic and tubercular affections flee, it 
is said, before this treatment and the wonderful air ; 
and apparently if Ponce de Leon had only chanced upon 
Las Vegas he would not have searched in vain for his 
fabled fountain. 

Albuquerque is an exceedingly " smart " town. Its 
residents are almost entirely Eastern capitalists, who are 
living here that they may keep an eye on their posses- 
sions, mines, ranches, and the things of this world in 
general. However largely they have laid up their treas- 
ures in heaven, they have a goodly amount also on earth, 
over which they perhaps keep closer watch and ward than 
over their more immaterial possessions. At all events, 
Albuqu erque is a sort of Newport of the West, where 
people drive and dance and dine from one week to an- 
other, and the women are so stylish as to suggest some 
occult affinities with the Rue de la Paix. 

In this brilliant and thoroughly up-to-date young city 
of Albuquerque, the metropolis of New Mexico ; in 
Las Vegas, one of the fascinating towns of the conti- 
nent ; in Raton and Gallup, and in its capital, Santa Fe, 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 201 

the territory has a galaxy of exceedingly interesting 
towns. 

Albuquerque is the trade centre of a region exceeding 
in area all New England. With a population estimated 
at some eighteen thousand ; the seat of the University of 
New Mexico, whose buildings occupy a plateau two hun- 
dred feet above the town, commanding a beautiful view ; 
with a scenic background of the Sandia and the Jemez 
mountains ; with the most extensive free Public Library 
in the territory ; two daily journals and a number of 
weekly papers in both Spanish and English, and several 
monthly publications ; with its splendid railway facilities 
both to the North and the South, as well as on the great 
trans-continental line from the East to the Pacific ; with 
the shops of the Santa Fe road employing over seven 
hundred men, as the junction point of three lines of this 
superb system ; and with the beautiful Alvarado hotel, 
in the old Spanish mission architecture, from whose wide 
piazzas the view comprises a host of mountain peaks 
piercing the turquoise sky, and whose beauty and comfort 
is a masterpiece of the magician of the Land of Enchant- 
ment; with the Musee of Indian relics and souvenirs of 
the Moki, the Navajo, the Zuni, Pima, and Apache ; the 
fine Mexican filigree work ; the model of an Indian 
pueblo, and other curios, — with all these and many 
other interesting aspects, Albuquerque fascinates the 
tourist. In the " Commercial Club " it has a unique 



202 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

institution representing the combination of business and 
social life. The broad streets are well lighted by elec- 
tricity ; there is electric transit and a fine water system. 
Albuquerque has also extensive manufacturing interests, 
in foundry, lumber, and other directions, which aggregate 
an investment of over two millions of capital with an 
annual productive value of more than four millions. 

Returning to Las Vegas ; with its ten thousand inhab- 
itants, its large floating population drawn by the medicinal 
hot springs, and the seat of the territorial Normal School. 
As a noted wool centre, and with its daily papers, good 
schools, and many churches, it is another alluring point. 
One feature of important interest is the new " Scenic High- 
way " that is in process of completion between Las Vegas and 
Santa Fe, across the Pecos Forest Reserve, which will offer 
some of the grandest views in any of the mountain regions 
of the West. It will be to Santa Fe and Las Vegas what 
the beautiful drive between Naples, Sorrento, and Amalfi 
is to Southern Italy. This scenic road will wind up to the 
Dalton Divide, nine thousand five hundred feet high 5 
where Lake Peak, glittering with snow, Santa Fe Canon, 
and other peaks and precipices and canons, are all about, 
and the Pecos River is seen far below as a thread of silver. 
This drive will be one of the famous features of the entire 
West when completed. New Mexico monopolizes the 
greatest belt of coal deposits west of the Missouri, while 
Arizona has the monopoly in pine forests. 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 203 

The reclamation work in the southern part of the 
Rio Grande Valley is now in successful process, and near 
Engle a reservoir forty miles in length will be established, 
having a capacity of two million acre-feet. It is esti- 
mated that a hundred and ten thousand acres of land 
will thus be put under irrigated agriculture which will 
vield marvellous returns in alfalfa, cereals, vegetables, 
and fruits. 

The government has also purchased the system of the 
Pecos Irrigation Company, which is now transferred to 
the Reclamation Service of the United States. This is 
the largest irrigation scheme in New Mexico. It is lo- 
cated on the Pecos River, which is fed from springs many 
of which gush forth from the earth with such force as to 
indicate that their source must be in high, snow-crowned 
hills. 

New Mexico's railroad facilities may be estimated from 
the fact that not a county in the territory is without a 
railroad, while many have the benefit of three lines. With 
twenty-five hundred miles of railroads within the terri- 
torial limits already in operation, it is confidently expected 
that this number will be increased to four thousand miles 
within two years, as much of this anticipated increase is 
already under construction. Of the present railways eleven 
hundred miles belong to the Santa Fe system alone. The 
matchless scenery of the Denver and Rio Grande route 
between Ontonito and Santa Fe offers the tourist one of 



204 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the most enjoyable of trips through Espanola, Caliente, 
and other points of beauty with the mountain peaks of 
San Antonio, Taos, Ute, and others within the horizon, 
often appearing like islands swimming in a faint blue 
haze. 

There is space and to spare in New Mexico. There 
are almost unlimited possibilities, with much to get 
and as much to give, and the latter is by no means less 
important in life than the former. Out of a total area of 
over seventy-eight million acres only about a quarter of a 
million are under irrigation agriculture, and the field for 
reclamation is as unlimited as it is promising. The land 
is fertile and the productions are abundant. The sky is a 
dream of color and of luminous beauty, and the climate is 
one of the most delightful in the entire world. Nor does 
New Mexico suffer from that which is the greatest depriva- 
tion of Arizona, — the lack of water. There is an abun- 
dance of the mountain flood waters that now go to waste 
which would store vast reservoirs ; there is the flow of 
copious streams and large river systems, and there are 
artesian belts of water all ready for mechanical appliances. 
The Campbell dry culture, which is increasingly in use in 
the eastern part of Colorado, has been successfully intro- 
duced into New Mexico. Fruit-growing is already becom- 
ing an important industry, and the apple orchard, of all 
other varieties of horticulture, is the most successful. At 
the Paris Exposition in 1900 New Mexico made an exhibit 



SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO 205 

of apples, and also at Buffalo in 1901, receiving from 
the former the award to rank with those of the best 
apple-growing regions in any part of the United States, 
and from the latter the first prize. Peaches, pears, 
and apricots grow well ; the cherry does not thrive in 
New Mexico, but grapes are grown with conspicuous 
success. 

The mineral resources of New Mexico are varied, and 
include gold, silver, copper, lead, and other minerals. In 
precious stones there is promise of untold development. 
The Tiffanys own large turquoise mines, whose supply, 
thus far, has proved inexhaustible ; and the opal and the 
moonstone are found in many places. But it is as an 
agricultural commonwealth, and as the repository of vast 
coal belts, that New Mexico is chiefly distinguished. 

It was early in February, 1880, that the first train 
over the Santa Fe railroad entered the territorial capital 
and initiated its transformation from the mediaeval Span- 
ish town to that which is, in part, the theatre of the 
progressive American life. In Santa Fe one of the land- 
marks pointed out to-day to the visitor is the old Santa 
Fe Trail, whose story was told so vividly, some years ago, 
by Colonel Henry In man, 1 who has described the majestic 
solitude of this highway and has narrated the mingled ex- 
periences of the early pioneers and the soldiers who thus 

1 The Old Santa Fe Trail : The Story of a Great Highway, 1897. 
The Macmillan Company. 



206 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

marched through the wilderness. History and romance 
mingle in the wonderful past of New Mexico, and it needs 
no sibyl of old to proclaim from the Mesa Encanteda 
the promise of the future to this beautiful Land of the 
Turquoise Sky. 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 207 



CHAPTER VII 

THE STORY OF SANTA FE 

" From scheme and creed the light goes out, 
The saintly fact survives, 
The Blessed Master none can doubt 
Revealed in holy lives. " 

" Oh, more than sacred relic, more 
Than solemn rite or sacred lore, 
The holy life of one who trod 
The footmarks of the Christ of God." 

In the place once occupied by those whose lives were con- 
secrated to the divine ideal, some influence, as potent as it 
is unseen, binds the soul to maintain the honor that they 
left ; to hold the same noble standard of life. The spell 
is felt even while it eludes analysis. Few to-day can tread 
the narrow, primitive little streets of old Santa Fe without 
some consciousness of this mystic influence. It was here, 
in the centuries gone from all save memory, that 

" there trod 
The whitest of the saints of God," 

and " The True City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis " 
(La Cvidad Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco) is 
forever consecrated by the memory of these holy men, and 
vital with the tragic interest, the heroic and pathetic story 



208 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

of their lives. As early as 1539 Friar Marcos de Nizza 
and other Fathers of the Church pressed on into this 
country — then an unknown wilderness — to extend the 
domain of the Holy Cross and carry onward " the true 
faith of St. Francis." They encountered every hardship 
possible to a savage land; sacrifice and martyrdom were 
their reward. They left a land of learning and refinement 
to carry the light into regions of barbarism. They gave 
their lives to teaching and prayer, and they sowed without 
reaping their harvest. Yet who shall dare think of their 
brilliant, consecrated lives as wasted ? for the lesson they 
taught of absolute faith in God is the most important in 
life. Faith provides the atmosphere through which alone 
the divine aid can be manifested, and the divine aid is 
sent through and by means of our friends and helpers and 
counsellors in the unseen world. It is man's business, his 
chief business, now and here, to co-operate with God in 
the carrying out of His plans and purposes. It was this 
literal and practical faith in divine aid that the Franciscan 
Fathers taught in the wilderness through all hardship and 
disaster. 

" Say not the struggle naught availeth." 

It must always avail. 

" Yet do thy work ; it shall succeed 

In thine or in another's day, 

And if denied the victor's meed 

Thou shalt not lack the toiler's pay." 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 209 

This Spanish mission work planted itself over the entire 
vast region which is now known as New Mexico, Arizona, 
and Southern California. The friars set out on long, 
lonely journeys, wholly without ways and means to reach a 
given destination save as they were guided by unseen 
hands and companioned by unseen guides. The cloud by 
day and the pillar of fire by night led them on. They 
w 7 ent forth to meet desolation and sacrifice and often mar- 
tyrdom ; yet their gentle zeal and cheerful courage never 
failed. They traversed hundreds of miles of desert wastes ; 
they encountered the cruel treatment of the Apaches and 
the Navajos; but these experiences were simply to them 
the incidents of the hour, and had no relation to the ulti- 
mate issue of their work. In 1598 the first church was 
founded, by a band of ten missionaries who accompanied 
Juan de Onate, the colonizer, and was called the chapel of 
San Gabriel de los Espanoles, but it was deserted when, in 
1605, the city of Santa Fe was founded by Onate, and in 
1630 the church of San Miguel was built. The original 
wall was partly destroyed in the rebellion of a half-century 
later, but it was restored in 1710, and the new cathedral 
was built on the site where the present one now stands. 
As early as 1617 there were eleven Spanish mission churches 
within the limits of what is now New Mexico, — at Pecos, 
Jemez, and Taos ; at Santa Clara, San Felipe, and other 
places, mostly within the valley of the Rio Grande. In 
six of the historic "seven cities of Cibola, 1 ' all Zuni 

14 



210 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

towns, these missions were established ; and in the ancient 
pueblo of San Antonio de Senecu, Antonio de Arteaga 
founded a church in 1629 ; in Picuries, in 1632, Friar 
Ascencion de Zarate established the mission, and in 1635 
one also in Isleta. In passing Glorieta, from the train 
windows, to-day, can be seen the ruins of the early 
mission church established there. Before the close of the 
seventeenth century the churches in Acoma, Alameda, 
Santa Cruz, Cuaray, and Tabira had been founded, the 
ruins of all of which are still standing. These Franciscan 
Fathers penetrated the desert and made their habita- 
tions in solitary wastes so desolate that no colonizers 
would follow; but to the Indians they preached and 
taught them the elements of civilized life. 

"Not the wildest conceptions of the mission founders 
could have foreseen the results of their California enter- 
prises," says Professor George Wharton James in his in- 
teresting work on these old missions. 1 " To see the land 
they found in the possession of thousands of savages con- 
verted in one short century, to the home of tens of thou- 
sands of happy, contented people, would have been a 
wild vision indeed. God surely does work mysteriously, 
marvellously, His wonders to perform." 

Santa Fe is the centre of the archdiocese whose other 

diocesean cities are Denver and Tucson. The archbishop, 

the Most Reverend J. B. Salpointe, D.D., whose presence 

1 In and Out of the Old Missions of California, by George Wharton 
James. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston, 1905. 




SAN' MIGUEL CIURC1I, SAXTA FE 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 211 

exalts the city of his residence, is one who follows rever- 
ently in the footsteps of Him whose kingdom on earth 
the early Franciscans labored to establish. 

In 1708 San Miguel was restored by Governor Jose 
Chacon Medina Salazar y Villasenor, Marques de Pefiuela, 
and two years later these restorations were completed. An 
inscription that can be traced to-day on the gallery bears 
this legend : 

El Senor Marques de la Pefiuela Hizo Esta Fabrica : El 
Alferez real Don Augustin Flores vergara su criado. Ano 
de 1710. 

Not only is this " City of the Holy Faith M consecrated 
by that sacrificial devotion of the Franciscan Fathers ; the 
heroic explorers and pioneers, the brave and dauntless 
soldiers, from the time of Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado to 
that of the gallant and noble General Kearney, have left, 
too, on Santa Fe, the impress of their noble lives and 
high endeavor. The old Cathedral of San Francisco, the 
ancient church of San Miguel, and the Chapel of San Ro- 
sario, all interest the stranger. In 1692 Diego de Vargas 
marched up from the south with two hundred men and 
looked sadly at the little town of Santa Fe, from which 
his countrymen had been driven. He knelt on the site 
where the chapel now stands, and prayed the Virgin to 
aid his endeavor, promising that in return he would build 
a chapel to her. He succeeded in conquering, and the 
chapel was then erected ; and once a year the statue of 



212 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the Virgin is taken from old San Miguel and carried in 
procession to the San Rosario Chapel (over a mile in 
distance), where, for the ensuing week, masses are said 
daily, and the chapel is open to all, after which it is 
closed again for another year. 

Adjoining San Miguel is the old house where Coronado 
is said to have lodged in 1540. The " Old Palace," always 
used by the Governors of New Mexico, is partly given over 
to a museum of Indian and Mexican curiosities. There 
is a little library, open only every other afternoon ; there 
are many mountain peaks around, which are not diffi- 
cult to climb, and which offer charming views. The new 
State House is a fine modern building, and Governor 
Hagerman, formerly an attache of the American Embassy 
at St. Petersburg, is alert and progressive in his methods. 

More than half the residents of Santa Fe speak no Eng- 
lish, and these Spanish and Mexican residents have their 
papers in their own language, their separate schools, and 
their worship in the old Cathedral. In the early afternoon 
women in black, with black mantillas over their heads, are 
seen passing up San Francisco Street and entering the Ca- 
thedral, where they fall on their knees and tell their beads 
in the silent church. Often one may see in the streets a 
funeral procession. The casket is carried in a cart, and 
the family sit around it, on the bottom of the wagon. 
A few friends follow on foot, and thus the pathetic and 
grotesque little procession winds on its way. 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 213 

The history lying in the dim background of this ancient 
Spanish city is one that impresses the imagination. It is 
a part of all that wonderful early exploration by the 
Spanish pioneers of the vast region of country that is now 
known as Arizona and New Mexico. 

In 1538 Alvar Numez de Vaca, after following the dis- 
astrous expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez to Florida, set 
forth with four men to penetrate the vast unknown wastes 
to the west, and without compass or provisions they made 
their way, crossing the Mississippi two years before its dis- 
covery by De Soto, reached the Moqui country, and finally 
arrived in Sinolao with glowing tales that excited the en- 
terprise of the Spanish conquerors and led to the founding 
of another expedition authorized by the viceroy, Mendoza. 
It fared forth under the leadership of Padre Marcos de 
Nizza, who (in 1539) entered the country of the Pimas, 
passed up the valley of the Santa Ana, and set up the 
cross, giving the country the name of the New Kingdom 
of San Francisco. 

Padre de Nizza's men were all massacred by the Moqui s, 
but he returned, as if bearing a charmed life, and set all 
New Spain aflame with his tales of gold and of glory, and 
the great opportunity to extend the work of the Holy 
Cross. 

Mendoza then proceeded to organize two other expedi- 
tions, one under the intrepid Vasquez de Coronado and the 
other under Fernando Alarcon. Coronado visited the 



214 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

ruins of Casa Grande and at last reached the " Seven 
Cities," but their fabled wealth had shrunk to the sordid 
actualities of insignificant huts, and Coronado returned 
to New Spain in 1542, disappointed and dejected. 

In the meantime the expedition of Alarcon had sailed 
up the Gulf of California (then known as the Sea of Cor- 
tez), and he discovered the Colondo and the Liba rivers, 
ascending the Colondo in boats up to the foot of the Grand 
Canon. Then for nearly half a century no further efforts 
to explore this region were made. But it is interesting to 
note that some eighty years before the landing of the Pil- 
grims a Spanish expedition had penetrated into the coun- 
try which is now Arizona, and have left definite record of 
their discoveries. 

In 1582 Antonio de Espejio explored the pueblos of 
the Zuni and Moqui tribes, visiting seventy-four in all, 
and discovering a mountain rich in silver ore. From this 
time New Mexico was under the rule of the Spanish 
conquerors. 

Juan de Onate, who married Isabel, a daughter of Cor- 
tez and a great-granddaughter of Montezuma, assumed 
the leadership, and about 1605 the town of Santa Fe 
was founded, and within the succeeding decade the Jesuit 
Fathers had built a dozen churches and their converts 
composed over fourteen thousand. A prominent padre in 
this movement was Eusebio Francisco Kino. 

Santa Fe has the distinction of being the oldest town in 




WATCH TOWER. CLIFF DWELLERS, NEW MEXICO 




CLIFF DWELLERS. WITHIN TWENTY-FIVE MILLS OF 
SANTA FE. NEW MEXICO 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 215 

the United States, having been established fifteen years 
before the landing of the Pilgrims. 

The mission church of San Xavier del Bac was estab- 
lished at so early a date that it was in ruins in 1768. and 
on its site was built the Jesuit one, in the valley of Santa 
Cruz, some ten miles south of Tucson. This mission is a 
rare mingling of Ionic and Byzantine architecture, with 
a dome, two minarets, and castellated exterior. The front 
bears the coat-of-arms of the Franciscan monks — a cross 
with a coil of rope and two arms below — one of Cohant 
and the other of St. Francis d'Assisi. There are four 
fresco paintings, and there are more than fifty pieces of 
sculpture around the high altar. 

The missions of Guevara, Zumacacori, and San Xavier 
were peculiarly fruitful in good results. The ruins of 
Zumacacori still cover a large space. The church is par- 
tially unroofed ; the form is seen to have been that of a 
plain Greek cross with a basilica, and a roofless chapel is 
standing. The basilica is still crowned by the cross, and 
the vital influence of this sign and seal of faith in the 
Christ, this commemoration of the sacrificial zeal that ani- 
mated the Jesuit Fathers is still felt by all who gaze upon 
this sacred emblem silhouetted against a blue sky. 

Santa Fe is, indeed, alive with the most profound and 
arresting interest. The work of the early Spanish mis- 
sionary priests effected a great work among the Indians 
in creating conditions of peace and industry ; for faith in 



216 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

God, taught in any form, is not merely nor even mostly 
an attitude of spirit : it is the instinctive action of life. 
It permeates every motive inspiring it with power ; it 
vitalizes every effort with creative energy. Faith in God 
may well be described as the highest possible form of po- 
tency. He who is receptive to the Divine Spirit moves 
onward like a ship whose sails are set to the favoring winds. 
He who is unreceptive to the Divine Spirit is like the ship 
before the wind with all her sails furled. " The merit of 
power for moral victory on the earth," said Phillips Brooks, 
" is not man and is not God. It is God and man, not 
two, but one, not meeting accidentally, not running to- 
gether in emergencies only to separate again when the 
emergency is over ; it is God and man belonging essentially 
together, — God filling man, man opening his life by faith 
to be a part of God's, as the gulf opens itself and is part 
of the great ocean." 

The unfaltering devotion of the Franciscan Fathers to 
the work of bringing civilization and Christianity to these 
Indian pueblos and their martyrdom in their efforts to es- 
tablish " the true faith of St. Francis " invests Santa Fe 
with an atmosphere of holy tradition. 

«* All souls that struggle and aspire, 

All hearts of prayer by Thee are lit ; 
And, dim or clear, Thy tongues of fire 

On dusky tribes and twilight centuries sit." 

These early Church Fathers taught a pure and high 
order of faith in the most practical way. They acquired 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 217 

the Indian language in sufficient measure to speak to the 
tribes. They taught them the rudiments of arithmetic, 
history, and geography — in the imperfect way then known ; 
but they gave their best. They inculcated industry and 
honesty. Their faith is largely told in the poet's words, — 

" That to be saved is only this : 
Salvation from our selfishness. " 

The missions through all the Southwest were peculiarly 
fruitful in good results. The ruins of many still exist, 
revealing them to have usually been in the general design 
of a nave and basilica crowned by the cross — this sign 
and seal of faith in the Christ. 

" O Love Divine ! whose constant beam 
Shines on the eyes that will not see, 
And waits to bless us ; while we dream 
Thou leavest, because we turn from Thee ! 

" Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed thou know'st : 
Wide as our need Thy favors fall ; 
The white wings of the Holy Ghost, 

Brood, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all." 

Three Spanish documents still exist in the territorial 
records of New Mexico dated 1693-1694, which give a full 
account of the Spanish conquest ; of the re-conquest by 
the Indians, and the final conquest again by the Spaniards. 
There is ample evidence that a city existed on the present 
site of Santa Fe four hundred years before the settlement 
at St. Augustine. The final Spanish conquest took place 



218 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

in 1692, but all the records prior to 1680 were unfortu- 
nately destroyed in the Pueblo Rebellion. New Mexico's 
historian, Hon. L. Bradford Prince, who has more than once 
served as Governor of the territory and who is one of the 
most distinguished men of the West, has finely said that 
the people of his territory, although threefold in origin 
and language (Spanish, Mexican, and American), are one 
in nationality, purpose, and destiny. In Governor Prince's 
history of New Mexico he notes its three determining 
epochs, — the Pueblo, the Spanish, and the American, — 
and he refers to it as " an isolated, unique civilization in 
the midst of encircling deserts and nomadic tribes." 

On August 18, 1846, General Stephen W. Kearney took 
possession of the capital of New Mexico in the name of 
the United States ; and on that date, for the first time, 
the national colors floated from the Old Palace and the 
acting Spanish Governor, Don Juan Baptista Vigil y 
Alvarid resigned his authority. 

On the historic plaza where now a memorial to this 
brave officer stands, placed there by the "Daughters of 
the Revoluton," General Kearney proclaimed the peaceful 
annexation of the territory of the United States. 

tc We come as friends to make you a part of the represen- 
tative government/' he said. " In our government all men 
are equal. Every man has a right to serve God according to 
his conscience and his heart." 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 219 

General Kearney assured the people of the protection 
of every civil and religious right, and this forcible and 
noble speech, — so characteristically representing the gen- 
erous and noble spirit of one of the ablest among the lead- 
ers and the heroes of the nineteenth century, — made a 
profound impression on the minds of all who listened to 
the words. When on August 18 of 1946 New Mexico 
shall celebrate her centennary of union with the United 
States, this memorable address of General Kearney's should 
be read to the assembled populace. Not even Lincoln's 
noble speech at Gettysburg exceeds in simple eloquence 
and magnanimity the lofty words of General Kearney. 
They were worthy to be spoken in " The City of the 
Holy Faith." 

It was thus that New Mexico entered the United States, 
Esto Perpetua. To-day, after a territorial novitiate of 
more than sixty years, she is ardently urging her claim 
for statehood. 

In old Santa Fe the past and the present meet. Gov- 
ernor Hagerman receives his guests in the same room in 
the Old Palace that was used by the first viceroy ; and 
seventy-six Spanish and Mexican and eighteen American 
rulers have preceded him, among whom was General Lew. 
Wallace, who, while serving as territorial Governor, wrote 
his immortal "Ben Hur" in one room of the palace, 
which is still pointed out to the visitor. During this 
period Mrs. Wallace wrote many interesting articles on 



220 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the history, the life, and the resources of the territory, in 
which are embalmed valuable information delightfully 
recorded. Mrs. Prince, the wife of ex-Governor Prince, 
a lady distinguished throughout all the country for her 
gracious sweetness and refined dignity of manner, is the 
president of the New Mexico Historical Association ; and 
the ex-Governor and Mrs. Prince, His Honor, Mayor 
Cotrell, and Mrs. Cotrell, Colonel and Mrs. Max Frost, 
and others of the choice society of Santa Fe, are pre- 
serving the history of this territory "that has survived 
all those strange modulations by which a Spanish prov- 
ince has become a territory of the Union bordering 
on statehood." Santa Fe is the home of some of the 
ablest lawyers in the United States, and one private 
law library is said to be the largest legal library west of 
Chicago. 

The Old Palace has been identified with the times of the 
Inquisition ; with the zealous work of Friar Marcos de 
Nizza, Friar Augustin Ruiz, and with Coronado and his 
band of warriors. On the Plaza, Juan de Onate unfurled 
the banner of Spain ; here de Vargas gave thanks for his 
victory, and here to-day is a simple monumental memorial 
of General Kearney placed there by the Daughters of the 
Revolution. The revered memory of Archbishop Lamy is 
closely associated with the place. In the Old Palace is a 
musee where a great array of unique curios is gathered ; 
pictures of saints rudely painted on skins; crucifixes 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 221 

rudely carved in wood or moulded in native silver ; gods 
carved in stone, and primitive domestic utensils. 

There is a very charming and cultivated society in 
Santa Fe of the small circle of American residents, — a 
circle that is of late rapidly increasing. The country 
around is rich in gems, — the turquoise, opal, onyx, garnet, 
and bloodstone being found in liberal deposits ; and in the 
town is a manufactory of Mexican filigree work that 
employs the natives only who are very skilful in this deli- 
cate art. The Plaza is a curiously fascinating place to 
saunter around, and the visitor finds himself loitering and 
lingering as he is wont to loiter and linger on the old 
Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The nomenclature of Santa 
Fe is sufficiently foreign to enable one to fancy himself 
in Andalusia, as such names as Padilla, Quintona, Lopez, 
Gutierrez, Vaca, and others recur. 

The Chapel of San Rosario, built by Senor Diego de 
Vargas, stands on a height overlooking Santa Fe a mile 
distant from the Plaza and the Old Palace. Near it is 
now located the Ramona School for the children of the 
Apaches. The legend of the founding of San Rosario is 
still on the air. When, in 1692, Senor de Vargas, marching 
from the south with his band of two hundred men, gazed 
upon the city from which, in 1680, his compatriots had 
been so tragically driven, he prostrated himself on the 
ground and implored in prayer the protection and aid of 
"Our Lady of the Rosary," and recorded his purpose 



222 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

that, would she but lead him on to victory, he would 
build, on the very site where he was kneeling, a chapel to 
her name. Arising, he led his band on to assault, and 
after a tragic struggle of eleven hours 1 duration he was 
victorious. Did the "Lady of the Rosary " shield and 
strengthen him ? Who shall venture to deny it ? 

" More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of." 

De Vargas had promised that, in case the victory was 
granted to him, he would have the statue of the Virgin 
carried from San Miguel to the San Rosary Chapel, as 
already noted. To this day the custom is fulfilled ; and 
each year, on the Sunday following Corpus Christi, this 
sacred drama is enacted, with sometimes two thousand 
people, drawn from all the country around, forming the 
procession. The statue is kept in the chapel a week, with 
solemn masses celebrated every morning, after which it is 
returned to San Miguel and the chapel is closed, not to 
be opened again until the octave of the Feast of Corpus 
Christi the next year. 

The " City of the Holy Faith " is very quiet in these 
days, and one finds little trace of the turbulent past when 
it was the storm centre of tragic wars and revolutions. 
The incessant warfare between the Spaniards and the 
Indians, the sublime courage and devotion of Bishop 
Lamy and other Fathers of the Church, constitute a won- 
derful chapter in the history of our country 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 223 

Santa Fe antedates the landing of the Pilgrims by more 
than twenty years. Its history is an unbroken record of 
thrilling and romantic events, from its capture by the 
Pueblos in 1680 ; the terrible massacre of the Mission 
Fathers, and the flight of the Governor to El Paso ; its 
conquest again by de Vargas in 1692 ; the change from 
Spanish to Mexican rule; then the splendid entrance of 
General Kearney and his troops (in the summer of 1846) 
in the name of the United States, down to the scenes and 
the incidents of the old Santa Fe Trail and thence to the 
present day, when three railroads have brought the city 
into close touch with the modern life of which it still 
refuses to become a part. Still, Santa Fe has nine mails a 
day, a free-delivery postal system, electric lights, and local 
and long-distance telephonic connection. The Capitol, 
where Governor Hagerman presides over the councils of 
state, is a fine modern building with a beautiful view from 
the dome. There is a new Federal Building of stone in 
classic design, in front of which is placed a monument to 
Kit Carson. St. Michael's College, the residence of the 
Archbishop, and the Government Indian School attract 
the eye. But it is the old Santa Fe of haunting historic 
memories that one dreams of in the narrow streets, or in 
looking down on the town from a mountain-side. The 
quaint little Plaza dreams in the sunshine, which lingers, 
as if with a Benedicite, on the Kearney memorial, while 
through the unshuttered and uncurtained windows of the 



224 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Old Palace, forming one side of the Plaza, the antique 
debris may be dimly seen. Should the ghost of any 
of the old Spanish warriors peer forth, the apparition 
would hardly produce a ripple of surprise. The long 
colonnade may be the favorite promenade of phantoms 
for aught one knows, — phantoms, that come and go, — 

"With feet that make no sound upon the floor." 

The twentieth-century sunshine lights up the dusky 
corners wherein are stored the relics of the Spanish 
conquerors and the followers of St. Francis. Perchance 
Francis d'Assisi himself, "revisiting the glimpses of the 
moon," glides along the shadows, drawn to the spot where, 
at so fearful a cost of life and treasure, his " holy faith " was 
guarded; or it may be the warrior in his armor who 
for an instant is dimly discerned through the dust- 
covered windows. Coronado, too, may haunt this scene. 
Many are those in the historic ranks who have contributed 
to the making of Santa Fe. It is the most composite 
city in American history. The very air is vocal with 
tradition and legend. 

The little shops around the Plaza bear their signs 
mostly in Spanish. Yet mingling with these is the office 
of Mr. Lutz of the Santa Fe transcontinental line, with 
which the New Mexican capital is connected by a branch 
to Lamy, on the main line, where one may stand andf 
converse with Denver, — a feat which may surprise the 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 225 

ghost of Coronado or of Juan de Onate were it looking 
on ; and Colonel Frost's daily journal, with its news of 
the world, is just at the corner. Not far away, too, is 
Mr. Linnev, who represents the United States Signal 
Service, and regards Santa Fe as a most opportune town 
in which to pursue his most up-to-date study of atmos- 
pheric phenomena. 

A remarkable personality in Santa Fe is Colonel Max 
Frost, the editor of "The New Mexican," the political 
leader of the Republican party and a man who, though 
blind and paralyzed, is simply a living encyclopaedia of 
historic and contemporary events. At eight o'clock every 
morning Colonel Frost is in his office, at his desk, dic- 
tating to three expert stenographers, carrying on three 
different subjects simultaneously. Instead of his blind- 
ness being a hindrance to his work, he has, by the sheer 
force of his remarkable energy, transformed the obstacle 
into a stepping-stone. " I can do more work in ten 
minutes than most men can in an hour," he said, in 
reply to a question, "as, being blind, I have nothing to 
distract my attention. I put my mind on my work and 
keep it there." 

Colonel Frost's experience is the most convincing tes- 
timony to the phenomenal power that lies in mental 
concentration. He cannot move without assistance, — 
physically he is a wreck ; yet he dictates columns of work 
daily ; he is the most influential leader of the political 

15 



226 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

party, and he is one of the makers of New Mexico. 
Every line of copy in his daily paper is read to him 
before it goes to press, and the vigorous and brilliant 
editorial page is largely his own work. For four hours, 
every evening, Mrs. Frost reads to him from the great 
Eastern dailies, the periodicals, and new books. It is said 
in New Mexico that Colonel Frost has been the power 
behind the throne in territorial legislation since the time 
that General Lew. Wallace served as chief executive in 
1879. 

Colonel Frost went to Santa Fe from Washington in 
1876 as a brilliant young officer, commissioned to build 
a military telegraph line from Santa Fe to Phoenix, Ari- 
zona, — a distance of five hundred miles. This commis- 
sion attracted great attention, and Colonel Frost became 
at once a power among the Spanish- American citizens of 
the territory. His great ability was widely recognized 
by leading men all over the Southwest. He was urged 
to remain and become a citizen of Santa Fe. As if to 
further prepare him for his remarkable life, he was com- 
missioned by the government to serve at several points in 
New Mexico on a variety of important matters, and he 
thus became singularly identified with the general progress 
of the country. 

With all his extraordinary work in conducting his paper 
and devoting himself to party political measures, Colonel 
Frost is serving his territory as Secretary of the Bureau 



THE STORY OF SANTA FE 227 

of Immigration with the most conspicuous ability. Under 
his electric touch and irresistible energy there is constantly 
prepared and sent out some of the finest transcriptions 
of the entire status of the country, in climate, resources, 
and opportunities ; in achievements already realized and 
in the potential developments of the future. Thousands 
of residents have been drawn to New Mexico through 
the data so ably set forth by Colonel Frost, the matter 
being, each year, revised to date. He knows, from per- 
sonal observation and intimate contact, every part of the 
territory ; he is personally acquainted with all the leading 
people ; and no visitor in the territory can feel his trip in 
any sense complete without meeting Colonel Max Frost. 
If every state and territory in the Far West could com- 
mand such efficient service in the literature of immigra- 
tion as is rendered by Colonel Frost, there would be an 
appreciable increase of their settlers. 

There are many eminent men in Santa Fe, — government 
officers, political leaders, gifted lawyers, — whom the stran- 
ger within the gates must recognize as among the ablest 
leaders and makers of the nation. A newspaper recently 
established, "The Eagle," ably edited by Mr. A. J. 
Loomis, adds another attraction and source of inspira- 
tion to the wonderful old city, whose life still continues to 
illustrate and exalt the " Holv Faith of St. Francis." 



CHAPTER VIII 

MAGIC AND MYSTERY OF ARIZONA 

"... The stars are glowing wheels, 
Giddy with motion Nature reels ; 
Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream, 
The mountains flow, the solids seem, 
Change acts, reacts ; back, forward hurled, 
And pause were palsy to the world. — 
The morn is come : the starry crowds 
Are hid behind the thrice-piled clouds ; 
The new day lowers, and equal odds 
Have changed not less the guest of gods.'''' 

Emerson 

Arizona is the Land of Magic and of Mystery. It is the 
land of the yet undreamed-of future, and it is also the region 
of brooding mystery, of strange surprise. Besides its stu- 
pendous Grand Canon, here are the canons of Chiquito, 
Marble, Desolation, and Limestone ; the Montezuma Well, 
Castle Dome, the Four Peaks — rising to the height of 
several thousand feet, for hundreds of miles ; the Thumb 
Buttes, San Francisco Peak, the Tonto Basin, and the Twin 
Lake — all of these phenomenal marvels of scenery telling 
their tale of the action of water and of fire thousands of 
ages ago ; convulsions of nature which have rent the 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 229 

mountains asunder, opened chasms thousands of feet deep 
in the earth, and projected the bottom of a sea into the 
air as a mountain peak, — 

" What time the gods kept carnival." 

The gods have, indeed, kept high carnival in Arizona. 
Every aspect of nature is on a scale of Titanic magnificence. 
The canon systems of its mountain ranges ; the inde- 
scribable grandeur which reaches its supreme majesty in 
the Grand Canon ; the wonders of extinct volcanic action ; 
the colossal channels cut by rushing craters ; the unearthly 
splendor of the atmospheric effects, and the coloring of 
the skies, — all combine to render Arizona an expression of 
magical wonder. All manner of phenomenal conditions 
is encountered. The land is a red sandy desert, whose 
leading productions are loose stones (lying so thickly in 
the sand as to make walking or driving all but impos- 
sible) and pine trees, petrified forests, and cacti. The 
riotous growth of the cactus is, indeed, a terror to the 
unwary. But it is in sunsets and enchantment of views 
and richness of mines, and in marvellous curiosities — as 
the Petrified Forest, Meteorite Mountain, and the Grand 
Canon — that Arizona distinguishes herself. She cannot 
irrigate her soil because there is no available water. But 
the pine forests — some of them — produce lumber ; the 
mines are rich, and the features of nature unequalled in 
the entire world ; while the exhilaration of the electric 



230 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

air and the wonderful beauty of coloring quite make 
up to Arizona resources that are unsurpassed if not 
unrivalled. 

Arizona is not an agricultural country by nature, nor 
hardly by grace. The resources are mining and timber. 
Still there are probably some twenty million acres capable 
of rich productiveness, on which wheat, barley, corn, vege- 
tables of all kinds, and also rice and cotton, could be success- 
fully cultivated if irrigation could be sufficiently effected. 
The largest area of agricultural land lies in the regions 
adjacent to Prescott and Phcenix. This Salt River Valley 
is rich in alluvial soil. The Liba Valley also offers, though 
in lesser area, the same fertile land, and the valleys of the 
Colorado, Chiquito, of Pueblo Viejo, the Santa Cruz, the 
San Pedro, the Sulphur Springs, and the great mesa 
between Florence and Phoenix, offer the same possibilities. 
The great problem of Arizona is that of irrigation, as most 
of the rivers lie at the bottom of inaccessible canons and 
present difficulties of access which no engineer can as yet 
clearly see a way to overcome. The conditions are, how- 
ever, materially assisted by the rainy seasons, occurring 
usually in February or March and in July or August, 
when water can be stored. The rain itself is as peculiar 
in Arizona as are other conditions of this wonderland. 
It rains in sections ; it may rain in torrents in a man's 
front yard while the sun shines in his back yard; or if 
this statement has something of the flavor of " travellers 1 " 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 231 

tales, it is at least typical of actual facts. Five minutes' 
walking is often all that is required to carry one into, or 
out of, a severe downpour of rain. The clouds follow the 
mountain spurs as invariably as a needle follows the magnet 
and a torrent may fall on the mountains above, flashing 
down in a hundred improvised raging cataracts and water- 
falls, while in the valley below the sun shines out of the 
bluest of skies. No panoramic pictures of the stage ever 
equalled the pictorial effects of a thunderstorm in the 
mountains, when the forked lightning leaps from peak to 
peak in a blaze, through the air ; when it dashes like a 
meteoric shower from rock to crag, and the thunder rever- 
berates with the mighty roar of a thousand oceans beating 
their surf on the shore. 

In Maricopa County, in the Salt River Valley, new and 
important conditions have been initiated by the govern- 
ment system of irrigation which has transformed arid lands 
into fertile gardens. The government has expended three 
million dollars in constructing the Salt River dam (sixty 
miles north of Phcenix), which is the largest artificial lake 
in the world. This reservoir will store one and a half 
million acres-feet of water, drawing it from the mountain 
canons miles away. Not only does this project mean an 
abundant water supply for a region heretofore useless, but 
rich returns as well. 

There are few regions which so attract and reward the 
researches of the scientist as does Arizona. The geologist, 



232 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the mineralogist, the ethnologist, the archaeologist, finds 
here the most amazing field for apparently unending 
investigation and study. Nor is the botanist excluded. 
The flora of Arizona offers the same strange and unique 
developments that characterize the region in so many 
other directions. The cacti flourish in riotous growth. 
The saguaro, a giant species, frequently attains a height 
of forty feet. A strange spectacle it is, with its pale green 
body, fluted like a Corinthian column, and its colossal 
arms outstretched, covered with immense prickly thorns 
and bearing purple blossoms. The century plant flour- 
ishes in Arizona. There is a curious scarlet flower, bloom- 
ing in clusters, at the top of straight pole-like stumps ten 
to fifteen feet in height, which terminate in luxuriant 
masses of scarlet blossoms and green leaves, and grow in 
groups of from a dozen to fifty together, producing the 
most fascinating color effects in the landscape. This 
plant is called the ocotillo. There are plants which pro- 
duce a fibrous textile leaf which the native Mexicans used 
as paper ; there are others whose roots are used as a sub- 
stitute for soap. The trees are largely pine, cedar, and 
juniper, though in many parts of the state the rolling 
foothills bear forests of oak, and the sycamore, ash, elder, 
walnut, and the swift-growing cottonwood are found along 
the watercourses. 

" The echinocactus, or bisnaga, is also called * The Well 
of the Desert, 1 " says Dr. Joseph A. Munk in some interest- 




COLLECTION OF CACTI MADE BY OFFICERS AT FORT 
MCDOWELL, ARIZONA, FOR THIS PICTURE 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 233 

ing sketches of Arizona. 1 " It has a large barrel- shaped 
body, which is covered with long spikes that are curved 
like fishhooks. It is full of sap that is sometimes used to 
quench thirst. By cutting off the top and scooping out 
a hollow, the cup-shaped hole soon fills with a sap that 
is not exactly nectar, but can be drunk in an emergency. 
Men who have been in danger of perishing from thirst on 
the desert have sometimes been saved by this unique 
method of well-digging." 

Of the palo verde Dr. Munk notes that it is "a true 
child of the desert," and he adds : 

" No matter how hot and dry the weather, the palo verde 
is always green and flourishing. At a distance it resembles 
a weeping willow tree stripped of its leaves. Its numer- 
ous long, slender, drooping branches gracefully crisscross 
and interlace in an intricate figure of filigree work. It has 
no commercial value, but if it could be successfully trans- 
planted and transported it would make a desirable addition 
to greenhouse collections in the higher latitudes. 

" The romantic mistletoe, that is world-renowned for its 
magic influence in love affairs, grows to perfection in South- 
ern Arizona. There are several varieties of this parasitic 
plant that are very unlike in appearance. Each kind par- 
takes more or less of the characteristics of the tree upon 
which it grows, hut all have the glossy leaf and waxen 
berry." 

1 Arizona Sketches, by Joseph A. Munk, M.D. The Grafton Press, 
New York. 



234 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

The grasses of Arizona, are, in some places, very beau- 
tiful, of a rich velvety green ; and the infinite varieties of 
wild clover, the gramma, the buffalo, the sacatone, and 
other grasses, are richly nutritive and offer good facilities 
for grazing. As a wool-producing country Arizona has no 
rival, the climate giving the best of protection to sheep 
with the minimum of care, and the grazing offering ade- 
quate means of support ; and stock raising of all kinds, in- 
deed, is destined to become a great industry in Southern 
Arizona. 

The climate of Arizona can only be alluded to in the 
plural, as in the expressive phrase of one of Mr. George 
W. Cable's Creole characters, " dose climates," for Arizona 
has all the climates of the known world. The range of 
choice almost exceeds the range of the Fahrenheit regis- 
tration. From the mountain summit, covered with snow 
for at least ten months out of the year, to the heat in 
Yuma, which has scored up to one hundred and twenty- 
eight degrees or more, there are all varieties and every 
conceivable quality of atmosphere. In the main, how- 
ever, the climate of Arizona is inexpressibly delightful. 

Dr. Munk, who is one of the distinguished physicians 
in Los Angeles, has made a study of Arizona as a health 
resort, and of its conditions he says : 

" The atmosphere of Arizona is not only dry, but also very 
electrical ; so much so, indeed, that at times it becomes al- 
most painful. Whenever the experiment is tried, sparks can 
be produced by friction or the handling of metal, hair, or wool. 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 235 

It affects animals as well as man, and literally causes f the 
hair to stand on end.' The writer has on various occasions 
seen a string of horses standing close together at a watering- 
trough, drinking, so full of electricity that their manes and 
tails were spread out and floated in the air, and the long hairs 
drawn by magnetic attraction from one animal to the other 
all down the line in a spontaneous effort to complete a circuit. 
There are times when the free electricity in the air is so 
abundant that every object becomes charged with the fluid, 
and it cannot escape fast enough or find i a way out ' by 
any adequate conductor. The effect of such an excess of 
electricity is decidedly unpleasant on the nerves, and causes 
annoying irritability and nervousness. 

" The hot sun sometimes blisters the skin and burns the 
complexion to a rich nut-brown color, but the air always 
feels soft and balmy, and usually blows only in gentle zephyrs. 
The air has a pungent fragrance which is peculiar to the 
desert, that is the mingled product of a variety of resinous 
plants. The weather is uniformly pleasant, and the elements 
are rarely violently disturbed. 

" In the older settled sections of our country, whenever 
there is any sudden or extreme change of either heat or cold, 
wet or dry, it is always followed by an increase of sickness 
and death. The aged and invalid, who are sensitive and 
weak, suffer most, as they feel every change in the weather. 
There is, perhaps, no place on earth that can boast of a per- 
fect climate, but the country that can show the fewest and 
mildest extremes approaches nearest to the ideal. The South- 
west is exceptionally favored in its climatic conditions." 



236 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

There is a legend that the poetic, musical name, Arizona, 
was derived from " An," a maiden queen who once ruled 
the destinies of the Primas, and " Zon," a valley, from the 
romantic configuration of the state, the two combining 
into the melodious " Arizona.*" The tradition is sufficiently 
romantic to be in keeping with the country it designates, 
and nothing tends more to simplify the too complex 
processes of life, not to say history, than to apply the rule 
of believing those things that appeal to one's sense of the 
"eternal fitness " and rejecting those which do not. The 
apostles of the simple life might well include this contri- 
bution toward simplicity as an axiom of their faith. At 
all events, as no other origin of Arizona's pretty name is 
on record, one may indulge himself in accepting this one 
with a clear conscience. 

The authentic Spanish history of Arizona dates to the 
exploration of Mendoza in 1540. For nearly three hundred 
years — until the treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo in 1866, 
when all the region north of the Gila and Mesilla valleys 
was incorporated into the area of the United States — the 
Spanish explorers and the Indian natives were in perpetual 
conflict, and it was as late as 1863 that Arizona received 
its name and individual domain as separate from New 
Mexico, with which it had been incorporated. At the 
time of the Guadaloupe-Hidalgo treaty Arizona did not 
contain a single white settlement in the north and west. 
Near Tucson and Tuba were a few hundred whites, but all 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 237 

the other portions were the domain of the Apaches and 
the Moquis. In 1856 the Hon. James Gadsden, then 
United States Minister to Mexico, negotiated for the pur- 
chase of this territory at a price of ten million dollars, and 
the Mexican colors in Tucson were replaced by the Stars 
and Stripes. On December 1, 1854, a memorial was pre- 
sented to the legislature of New Mexico for a separate terri- 
torial organization and name of the new acquirement. 

Although the Spanish civilization has long since receded 
into the dim historic past, its spirit is impressed in the 
very air ; its zeal and fervor still, in some mysterious way, 
permeate the atmosphere. 

Until 1863 Arizona remained a portion of New Mexico, 
the separate territorial government of each being inaugu- 
rated at Fort Whipple, near Prescott, — a thriving town 
of some six thousand people, named for the historian 
whose works are the unquestionable authority on matters 
of the Aztec and Spanish civilizations. Prescott is one of 
the young Western cities that has a great future. Its 
altitude insures it a delightful climate, the railroad facili- 
ties are good, and it is in a region of almost fabulous 
mineral wealth. The " United Verde " mine, one of the 
possessions of Senator Clark of Montana, is some thirty- 
five miles from Prescott and yields vast revenues. Within 
thirty miles of the town there are very large beds of onyx, 
one of which covers over one hundred acres. This onyx 
is found in all colors, — the translucent old gold, green, 



238 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

red, black, and white, with much in richly varied combina- 
tions of color. Prescott has an altitude of a mile above 
the sea and is a summer resort of itself for Phoenix and 
other Southern Arizona towns. It is a distance of some 
three hundred miles from Ash Fork to Winhelman, and 
Prescott and Phcenix are one hundred miles apart, Pres- 
cott being only a hundred miles from Ash Fork and Phcenix 
about the same distance from Winhelman. Near Pres- 
cott there is a curious spot which is not less worthy of 
world-wide fame than is the "Garden of the Gods" at 
Colorado Springs ; although the " Point of Rocks,' 1 as 
this grotesque system of formation near Prescott is called, 
is little known to travellers. It is of that same unique 
sandstone formation that is found in the " Garden of the 
Gods." Ruskin declared that he could not visit America 
on the ground that it contained no castles ; but had his 
vision included Colorado and Arizona, with their wonder- 
ful sandstone formations, he would have found castles galore 
so far as scenic effect goes. It is not alone the " Garden 
of the Gods" and the "Point of Rocks" that are mar- 
vellous spectacles, but all over the states, here and there, on 
foothill and mountain and mesa, these strange, fastastic, 
colossal rock formations arise, that have all the landscape 
effect of the castles and towers in Italy. 

All the country around Prescott is alluring. On the 
branch road from Ash Fork of the main transcontinental 
line to Winhelman some three hundred miles south, there 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 239 

is an assortment of scenery which might be described as 
warranted to please every taste. There are lofty moun- 
tains pine-clad and green with verdure ; others are seen 
barren and bleak, whose sides and foothills are only dec- 
orated with the debris of mines. There are vast desert 
solitudes where only the misshapen cacti grow, looming 
up like giant skeletons in the air; and again there are 
glades carpeted with a profusion of flowers in brilliant 
hues. There are river-beds (arroyos) without any water 
and there are streams that go wandering about, in aimless 
fashion, devoid of regulation river-beds. Some of the ar- 
royos, indeed, have streams running in strong currents, but 
they hide these streams under the river-bed, as something 
too valuable perhaps for common view. The clairvoyance 
of the scientific vision, however, detects this fraud on the 
part of the arroyo at once, so that of late years it is of little 
use for any well-regulated river to hide its current under 
its bed. It may just as well relinquish the attempt and 
let the stream run in an honest Eastern fashion, like the 
Connecticut River, for instance, which is staid and steady, 
like its state, and never undertakes to play pranks with 
its current. Since the scientist has fixed his glittering eye 
on Colorado and Arizona, all the gnomes and nixies have 
the time of their life to elude this vigilance, and they 
seldom succeed. The scientist relentlessly harnesses them 
to his use ; and though a river may think to conceal its 
course by taking refuge under its bed instead of running 



240 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

honestly along above it, the effort is hopeless in an age 
when the scientist is abroad. It is said that there are no 
secrets in heaven, and apparently nature is very like 
paradise in this respect at least, for it is quite useless for 
her to pretend to keep her operations to herself. The 
specialist, the expert, surprises every secret she may 
treasure. 

Of all the rivers in Arizona no one has more entirely 
defied all the accepted traditions of staying in its place 
and keeping within its own limits than has the Colorado, 
which, not content with the extraordinary part it plays 
at the bottom of that Titanic chasm, the Grand Canon, 
is now creating an inland sea, named the Salton Sea, in 
Southern California. Prof. N. H. Newell, the govern- 
ment expert hydrographer of the United States Geological 
Survey, has given close attention to the Colorado of late, 
and of it he says : 

" . . . The Colorado cuts in its course the deepest canons 
on the face of the earth. From the solid rocks where it has 
made them, through hundreds of miles, it has taken material 
down to the Gulf of California, and by slight but regular an- 
nual overflows gradually built banks on each side out into that 
gulf. These, in time, cut off the head of the gulf, leaving 
dry a depression in Southern California, considerably below 
sea level, known as ' the Salton ' Sink.' For miles of its 
journey the Southern Pacific runs below sea level. Ten 
thousand people, approximately, in what is known as the 




K !Z5 

a o 
z < 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 241 

Imperial Valley, live below the sea level. A privately owned 
irrigation enterprise, on the Mexican side of the line, cut a 
gash into this bank of the Colorado which nature had been 
forming. The high waters came and man lost control of his 
artificial channel, with the result that the river thought best 
to pour its waters back into the depression which had once 
been a part of the Gulf of California. To get the river to 
resume its own course is no small task, and with it the 
Southern Pacific railroad evidently purposes to grapple 
heroically. 

et The river is now pouring down a steep declivity into this 
basin, which is two hundred feet or more below the sea level. 
If this were allowed to continue, it would make a great salt lake 
in Southern California. This water has already risen to the 
point where it has submerged big salt works and fifteen miles 
of the Southern Pacific's overland track, forcing that com- 
pany to build around the rising sea, and, unless its engineers 
succeed in routing the Colorado for its old destination, it will 
be necessary to rebuild a much longer piece of that road. 
Some people have argued that such a sea would affect favor- 
ably the climate of Southern California, but they forget that 
the great Gulf of California, jutting into the most barren 
regions of the United States and Mexico, seemingly has had 
no good effect on the climate of either. The Salton Sea 
would add only two per cent of water surface to that part of 
the country, and so hardly would do what the Gulf of Cali- 
fornia has not accomplished. Unless the break is restored, 
the river will pour into this basin, forming a very shallow lake, 



242 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

which would be almost a frying-pan under that semi-tropical 
sun. This would continue to rise until evaporation balanced 
the river flow, and then would fluctuate with the seasons of 
the year, shrinking in area during the months of the heavi- 
est evaporation and slightest inflow. 

" The gash in the river bank was cut by a Mexican corpora- 
tion on that side of the international line, but the water is 
delivered to a number of American corporations, so that 
to-day several are concerned in the affair. It is understood 
that the Southern Pacific, when the river reaches its lowest 
stage, will put in a great force of men in an endeavor to get 
the river back to its former course. One great difficulty 
comes in the sugar-like material which has been eroded, in 
which it is extremely hard to insert any permanent structure. 
A pile one hundred feet deep will be driven into it, and almost 
as soon the water, working in under it, will lift it out." 

The Salton Sea, at this writing, covers an area of over 
four hundred square miles, and is constantly increasing. 
The great Southern Railway that traversed its border has 
been driven twice from its line and forced to lay new 
roadbeds and tracks. It is also creating great confusion 
as to irrigation facilities, both in the United States and 
in Mexico, within the region where it lies ; and as a 
scientific event it is one of the first magnitude, — an act 
in the drama of nature made visible to all. 

The Salton Sink has long been known to the explorers 
and visitors of this region. It was a vast basin of some 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 243 

one hundred and forty miles in length and sixty-five or 
seventy in width ; the evident bed of a former sea, which 
had become a desolate and barren waste. Sometimes a 
mirage — a not unfrequent phenomenon in Arizona and 
Southern California, — would transform this long de- 
serted basin into a phantom sea, wonderful in aspect. 
To what extent this transformation will continue defies 
prophecy. 

Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, is in Maricopa County, 
— a county as large as the entire state of Massachusetts. 
The journey of two hundred miles between Ash Fork and 
Phoenix is one of the most uncanny and unearthly sort of 
trips, with mountains resembling a witches' dance, — full 
of grotesque wonder and romantic charm, — but the expe- 
rience is almost like visiting another planet and coming 
under totally different conditions of life. Phoenix is both 
the capital and the metropolis of Arizona, and no city* 
west of the Mississippi is more popular among tourists or 
is able to inspire a stronger sentiment of attachment among 
its residents. To some twelve or thirteen thousand inhab- 
itants are added, every winter, from four to five thou- 
sand tourists. The city lies in the centre of the Salt River 
Valley, — that marvel of the Southwest. The most im- 
portant and valuable agricultural region in Colorado lies 
in Maricopa County, of which Phoenix is the pet and 
pride. In this locality the visitor to Arizona returns to 
the normal day and daylight world again. The forest 



244 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

trees are not stone quarries, nor have meteors, wandering 
through space, buried themselves in its soil. There is no 
need of colossal magnetic appliances to seek to discover 
and extricate some submerged star. Nor has the earth 
opened and disclosed an Inferno, " bathed in celestial fires," 
as that of the Grand Canon far away to the northwest. 
The streams " stay put " within their legitimate borders, 
and are apparently as firm in " standing pat " as is the 
Republican party over a (new) tariff revision. Maricopa 
County pursues a way of peaceful prosperity, with no lapse 
into the vaudeville of petrified forests and buried stars. 
Her stars make their appointed rounds in the skies, and 
shine nightly upon the just and the unjust. In the 
northern part of Maricopa there are mineral districts 
of rich ores, gold and copper as well as silver, lead, 
and others, but chiefly the county holds her way as an 
agricultural region, indulging in no freaks. Canals radi- 
ate in every direction from the Salt and the Verde rivers. 
The Salt River Valley is so level that a theory prevails 
that in some prehistoric ages it was smoothed by the 
Toltec civilization, which even preceded that of the Aztec. 
Fields of alfalfa, miles in extent, smile in the sunshine, 
while cattle graze knee-deep in luxurious clover. Orange 
groves alternate with the apple and apricot orchards. 
The date-palm, the fig, and the olive trees abound. Beau- 
tiful homes stand in spacious grounds shaded by the dark 
foliage of the umbrella tree, through which gleams the 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 245 

scarlet of the oleander and the brilliant gold of the 
pomegranate. 

Phoenix offers to the resident or the visitor a good pro- 
portion of the best that life can give : in good society, that 
which is intelligent, moral, cultured, and sympathetic ; in 
an admirable school system ; in churches of many denomi- 
nations, — Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Pres- 
byterian, Christian Science, and others, — all having their 
fine houses of worship and earnest congregations. There 
is an excellent and a constantly growing public library, and 
there are four daily and several weekly newspapers, busi- 
ness blocks that would do no discredit to any large Eastern 
city, a circuit telephone system completely equipped, gas 
and water works, free city and rural mail delivery, good 
hotels, a theatre, and an opera house. There are banks 
and a Board of Trade. There are clubs both of men and 
women. The State Normal School of Arizona is nine 
miles distant — in Tempe. 

There are three railroads that centre in Phoenix which 
transport the traveller with the usual accepted ease and 
luxury of modern railroading ; and a new road to form a 
link in a second Santa Fe transcontinental line will then 
place Phoenix on a trunk road over which the Santa Fe 
traffic will largely pass. 

The winters in Phoenix are most attractive. From 
October till May there is a climate all balm and sunshine 
without the enervating quality felt in the tropics. The 



246 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

region all around has good roads, and driving and riding 
are most enjoyable. 

Seventy-five miles east from Phoenix, in the Tonto 
Basin, the government is building a vast water storage 
dam which it is expected will liberally irrigate two hun- 
dred thousand acres of land which, under reclamation, will 
produce in rich abundance both agricultural and horti- 
cultural products. The climate and conditions combine 
those of the temperate and the semi-tropical zones and 
favor products grown in both. The Tonto dam will be, 
with the possible exception of the Assouan dam in Egypt, 
the greatest storage enterprise in the world. It will be 
constructed of hard sandstone imbedded in cement, making 
it as permanent as the mountains. It will be two hundred 
and eighty-five feet above foundations and only two hun- 
dred feet wide at the bottom. Above will be a lake about 
twenty-five miles long, with storage capacity for one and 
a half millions acre-feet, which means enough water to 
cover that number of acres a foot deep. Even to the best 
of cement, Nature has provided on the ground every neces- 
sity for construction. Along the hillsides above is being 
dug a power canal, to discharge above the dam, there to 
generate not less than five thousand horsepower, — more 
than enough for the demands of construction. When the 
dam is finished this power will be transmitted electrically 
to the vicinity of Phoenix, here to be used for pumping. 
The government engineers have made plans for eventually 






MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 247 

developing eighteen thousand horsepower, by harnessing 
the falls of the river and the canals. 

The Salt River Valley has more than fifty thousand 
acres devoted to alfalfa, which sometimes yields six crops 
in a year. Wheat, barley, and corn are also grown, and 
the orange groves produce the finest fruit known in the 
Eastern markets, antedating by a month the California 
oranges. Grapes, apricots, and dates abound ; and if 
Maricopa County does not literally as well as figuratively 
find that her land is flowing in milk and honey, it is 
certainly not for lack of the most favorable conditions. 

The Arizona strawberries, too, are a feature of impor- 
tance in the fruit market, as for both size and flavor they 
absolutely exceed almost any other in the United States. 

All this sunny prosperity of conditions and loveliness 
of climate reacts on life. There is a poise, a serene con- 
fidence, and a charm of good-will and joyous companionship 
felt in Phoenix that give to this delightful young city 
an individuality of its own. 

The great dam now being built in the Tonto Basin has 
made it necessary to destroy the town of Roosevelt, — a 
village of two thousand inhabitants, with its churches, 
schools, water-works, electric lights, and other appliances 
of modern civilization. " Roosevelt must perish," writes 
a press correspondent, " that a desert may be made to bloom. 
Already the marvellous engineering work is well under 
way. The walls of the narrow canon through which Salt 



248 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

River rushes on edge are being locked by a massive mono- 
lith of solid masonry, the highest arch dam in the world ." 
The writer continues : 

"This wonderful structure of sandstone and cement will 
be two hundred and eighty feet in height from foundation to 
parapet. Placed by the side of an eighteen-story skyscraper, 
this dam would rise ten feet above it, while its length on top 
would be more than two city blocks. A turbulent stream, 
with its enormous floods, will beat itself into stillness against 
the masonry monster, its foam and spume lost in a deep lake 
twenty-five miles long and two miles wide. 

"By day and by night the dull roar of dynamite breaks 
the desert stillness, and the canon walls go crashing down 
to furnish material for this structure. On the hill far above, 
the rock crushers never stop grinding the limestone, and 
great kilns, white hot, are burning daily hundreds of barrels 
of cement. 

" When night comes, myriads of electric lights burst forth, 
weirdly illuminating a busy army of toilers working gnome- 
like in a shadowy canon. A star-gemmed heaven looks down 
upon a wondrous scene, unreal, awesome, and inspiring. 

"This great work of the government possesses unusual 
attractions for the engineer and the layman. It is located in 
a valley which has been the abode of three races, one of 
which lived here when Caesar sat upon his throne. In an age 
forgotten the cliff-dwellers built their eyrie-like homes along 
the canons of this stream, and in the narrow valleys the lines 
of their irrigation canals may yet be traced. Centuries later 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 249 

the Apaches came, and for many years their tepees dotted 
the basin. Then came the white man, who sought to recon- 
quer the desert, which had resumed its sway after the cliff- 
dwellers vanished. 

"The battle with unfriendly nature proved too much for 
the pioneer, and Uncle Sam took a hand in the fight. No 
problems could daunt his engineers. They laughed at floods 
and mocked at desolation. A dam site was discovered sixty- 
two miles from a railroad, and they proceeded to connect it 
with civilization by a marvellous road which winds its way for 
forty miles through deep canons, along the face of frowning 
precipices, over foaming cataracts, and across broad areas of 
treeless desert. It opens up to the transcontinental traveller 
a new region of compelling interest and of splendid scenery. 
Better than that, it provides an easy thoroughfare for the 
transportation of heavy machinery of all kinds and the sup- 
plies for the new community which sprang into life almost at 
a word. 

"... Every stone that is laid in the narrow arch, which 
is to retain the foaming river now rushing through the 
canon, brings nearer and nearer the day when Roosevelt 
shall vanish beneath an inland sea. When the great dam is 
completed, in 1908, and its massive gates of steel, weighing 
eight hundred thousand pounds, are shut down, a rising flood 
will cover the site of the city with two hundred feet of 
water. 

" The ingenuity of man has been taxed in this work. Its 
isolated position, the difficult physical conditions, the tre- 



250 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

mendous and unexpected floods, have tried the mettle of the 
engineers. The enormous amount of cement required was 
in itself a problem which forced Uncle Sam to turn manu- 
facturer in order to solve it. Nature, having kindly furnished 
an ideal site for a dam, was thoughtful enough to provide 
materials near at hand for making cement. A cement mill 
was quickly erected at a cost of one hundred thousand dol- 
lars. The downward rush of the river was utilized for electric 
power to operate the mill, and many thousand barrels of first- 
class cement have already been used in the works. 

" But while the city of Roosevelt, with the homes of its 
two thousand inhabitants, is doomed, a fair valley is to be 
redeemed in which the agricultural possibilities are not 
exceeded anywhere in the world. Under almost tropical 
skies, with a soil of wonderful fertility, the farmer in Salt 
River Valley will cultivate his orange groves, his fig trees, 
his vines, while his broad meadows will yield him heavy 
harvests of alfalfa six and seven times a year. 

" The great lake which will be created by the Roosevelt 
dam is to be tapped by canals hundreds of miles long and 
extending all over the broad valley around Phoenix. Vast 
areas now absolutely worthless will be transformed quickly 
into blossoming orchards and purpling vineyards, and hun- 
dreds of happy homes will dot a plain where now the giant 
saguaro rears its spiny head and the gila monster roams 
at will." 

Life in the Far West is a continual series of the 
occurrence of such events as these. Its problems are 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 251 

largely solved by the civil engineer and the irrigation 
expert, who transform vast deserts to regions of blossom- 
ing beauty, change the course of a river, send railroad 
trains climbing the mountain peaks or penetrating be- 
neath the range, and who are, in short, the modern 
magicians who work their will with the forces of nature. 
The National Reclamation Act is fairly recreating the 
entire Southwest. 

The Gila River, which is the largest tributary of the 
Colorado, flows through the regions south of Florence, 
Arizona, and affords water to many fertile and beautiful 
valleys ; and Florence, with the towns of Yuma, Tucson, 
Glendale, Bisbee, Winslow, and others, is fully abreast 
in modern life. Large department stores, public libraries, 
schools and churches, women's clubs, daily newspapers, 
good railroad facilities, free postal delivery, — all these 
make up the environment of a splendid and progressive 
citizenship. As the Governor of Arizona, Hon. Joseph H. 
Kirley, has recently said : 

" Nowhere can a man who respects his neighbor's rights, 
with reasonably strict attention to his own business, go about 
with more freedom and with greater confidence of personal 
safety than in Arizona. Locked and barricaded doors are in 
most parts of Arizona a novelty. The professional thief is 
almost unknown in the territory." 

The East — at least the portion of it that has not 
personally visited the magic land of Arizona — can form 



252 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

little idea of its marvellous resources and its potent 
achievements. 

The statehood problem looms up on the social and 
political horizon, and there is a strong feeling that to 
force Arizona and New Mexico into union would do violence 
to the judgment and the feeling of the citizens of Ari- 
zona. For several years past the incipient possibility of 
statehood on these terms has aroused widespread opposition. 

The local press voices almost daily the editorial con- 
victions that such a union would be most disastrous to 
the interests of Arizona — a country which is simply a 
wonderland of treasure and rich and varied resources. 
Arizona is settled chiefly by people from the great South 
and from New England, the Middle West being hardly 
represented ; its citizens are of the best quality of our 
national life, and to unite them with those of New Mexico 
— a large proportion of whom can hardly speak or under- 
stand the English language even, to say nothing of their 
divergence in race, requirements, and habits from the 
population of Arizona — would be imposing upon them 
a century's delay in realizing the grand ideals of educa- 
tion, moral progress, and economic development now pre- 
vailing in Arizona. v 

Phoenix has to-day a better public-school system than 
Boston, and other surprising degrees of progress might 
be related of many of the towns. 

Hon. N. O. Murphy, twice a Governor of Arizona, 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 253 

has recently made an eloquent plea against forcing these 
two territories into union as a state. Ex-Governor Murphy 
was appointed by President Harrison (in 1889) Secretary 
of Arizona. Under President Cleveland he was elected 
the Delegate to Congress representing the territorial in- 
terests ; and on the expiration of this term he was 
appointed by President McKinley the Governor of the 
territory. His experience has given him the most inti- 
mate knowledge and wide grasp of territorial conditions, 
and in a letter of three columns over his own signature to 
the " Washington Post,'" appearing under date of February 
25, 1906, ex-Governor Murphy does not hesitate to say 
that were the Bill for united statehood then pending 
before Congress passed, it would be one of the greatest 
legislative outrages ever perpetrated in this country. " I 
refer particularly to the proposed merger of the terri- 
tories of Arizona and New Mexico into a single state 
against the protests of the people of those territories," he 
added. 

The ex-Governor points out these statistical facts : 

The area of New England, comprising six states, with 
twelve senators, is 64,968 square miles ; the area of the 
territory of Arizona is more than twice greater, being 113,916 
square miles. 

The area of the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, 
now proposed to be merged, is 235,117 square miles, or 
greater than Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, 



254 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, Maryland, and New Jersey, represented in the Upper 
House now by twenty-two senators." 

The fact that the population of New Mexico is largely 
Mexican, and that of Arizona is mostly American, sug- 
gests a potent reason for the strong feeling in Arizona 
against this proposition. Their racial instincts and their 
business interests alike conflict. If they are joined as a 
single state, there will be continual jealousy and friction, 
and legislation to promote the interests of one-half the 
state will necessarily be at the expense of the other. 

To the traveller sensitive to the spell of a strange, 
unearthly beauty, Arizona prefigures itself as the country 
God remembered rather than as " the country God forgot." 
It is at once the oldest and the newest of the states. Its 
authentic and historic past antedates the coming of the 
Mayflower to the rocky and desolate December shores of 
Massachusetts, while its future flashes before one like an 
electric panorama outspeeding wireless telegraphy. It is 
the Land of Magic and Mystery. The light is a perpet- 
ual radiance, as if proceeding from some alchemy of dis- 
tilled sunshine. While Colorado is the Land of Perpetual 
Dawn, of an heroic and poetic achievement, Arizona is 
the region of brooding mystery, of strange surprise. 

There are the music and pictures of Arizona in her 
fertile valleys, her wide rolling mesas ; and the very 
melody of the wind harps meet and mingle with the 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 255 

organ strains of sweeping orchestral effects of the winds 
in the canons and in wild, desolate gorges where impene- 
trable twilight renders them a veritable No Man's Land. 
Mr. Aldrich's " Two Shapes " might have met in that un- 
canny region of the Petrified Forest. The very dance of 
the Brocken may nightly be seen in the midnight fissures 
and steep precipices of the Grand Canon. 

It is, however, essentially the land of mirage and mys- 
tery, this wonderful Arizona ! As one journeys about 
he half fancies that he hears on the air those magic lines : 

" O birds of ether without wings ! 
O heavenly ships without a sail ! " 

Every incredible thing is possible in this miracle coun- 
try, where purple mountain peaks quiver in the shimmer- 
ing golden light, where ruins of remote ages stand side 
by side with the primitive mechanism of pioneer living, 
where snow-capped mountain peaks are watched from 
valleys that have the temperature and the productions 
of the tropics. Arizona contains unknown and undreamed 
of resources of gold, copper, and silver. The state has 
the richest possibilities in mineral wealth ; there are thou- 
sands of square miles of range lands ; there is wealth of 
forests, although it is a part of the miracle character of 
this state of color and dream life that its forests are 
almost as much concealed from casual view as are its 
minerals hidden in the depths of the earth, for they are 



256 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

secluded in deep canons or they are high out of sight on 
the mountain summits. In fruits and flowers Arizona has 
the luxurious growth and lavish abundance of the tropics, 
producing grapes, figs, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, 
pineapples, and peaches, — almost everything, indeed, 
unless it be the apples of Hesperides. 

Although Arizona has not the electric exhilaration and 
infinite energy of Colorado, it has a delicious quality, 
as if the very air were a caress. Though warm in the 
south, the heat has none of the enervating effect of the 
heat where humidity combines with it. The heat here is so 
dry, the air so pure, that there is little extreme discomfort 
even when the mercury soars to legendary altitudes. In 
winter all Southern Arizona is a paradise of loveliness. 
At this season the towns of Florence, Phoenix, Tucson, 
Yuma, and other points invite one to the balmy air, the 
luminous brilliant skies, and the nights, which are a glory 
of starry illumination. Northern Arizona has a perfec- 
tion of summer climate, and the Grand Canon is destined 
in the near future to become one of the great summer 
resorts of the world. With the splendid facilities for 
comfort offered by the arrangements, the traveller finds 
all his accustomed conveniences, and the canon has liter- 
ally all seasons for its own. There is one glory of July 
and another glory of January ; there is a transcendent 
loveliness of June, and an equally indescribable charm of 
October. No month is without its special reasons for 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 257 

visiting at that time this most marvellous scenic wonder 
of the entire earth. 

In remote ages Arizona was evidently an inland sea. 

Montezuma Well, on the Verde River, some fifty miles 
from Prescott, is one of the strange spectacles of Arizona. 
The well is on an elevated mesa of solid limestone. It has 
a circular opening some six hundred feet in diameter, as 
perfect as if carved by a skilled workman. From the 
surface opening down to the water is a distance of some 
seventy feet, and the water itself is over one hundred feet 
deep. It is perfectly clear and pure. Near the well are 
several cave dwellings, and fragments of pottery abound 
in the vicinity. There are beds of lava, also revealing that 
the well is the crater of an extinct volcano. 

There can be no question but that Arizona is one of 
the most marvellous regions of the world. Its interest to 
the tourist is not exceeded by that of the Yellowstone, 
whose mountains and geysers and strange color effects 
enchant poet and painter. For the canon system of the 
Arizona mountain ranges, the stupendous majesty of 
scenic grandeur which reaches its supreme aspect in the 
Grand Canon of the Colorado, the wonders of extinct 
volcanic action, the colossal channels cut by the action 
of water, the unearthly splendor of the coloring in sky 
and atmospheric effects, all combine to make this state 
the very embodiment and visible expression of magic and 
mystery. 



258 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

In the broken mountain ranges the detached peaks 
extend, with narrow, fertile valleys lying between; while 
deep canons and wild gorges, with rushing mountain tor- 
rents, still further diversify the grandeur of the panorama. 
Five great rivers add another impressive feature, — the 
Colorado, the San Juan, the Salinas, the Verde, and the 
San Francisco, — this system of rivers completing the most 
extraordinary combination of mountain, valley, mesa, and 
canon to be found in the entire world. Numberless extinct 
volcanoes and vast lava beds add their fantastic imagery ; 
and the metamorphic rock strata, recording the most 
violent volcanic upheavals, tell the prehistoric story of 
the fiery molten flood which swept over all this region 
when the earth was new. 

As has perhaps been suggested in the preceding 
pages, life in Arzona is by no means without its features 
of entertainment. These include various aspects, not to 
mention one that is by no means to be enjoyed in any 
of the great Eastern centres, — that of the exclusive 
annual festivity of the " Snake Dance. 1 " Chicago and 
Paris, New York and London, may find social entertain- 
ment in balls and opera, dancing and dining, but in Ari- 
zona one goes to this entertainment on the Painted Desert ; 
and if in some happy summer of life one's horoscope has 
deflected his course into Arizona and Colorado, one comes 
to regard those fascinating localities with the devotion of 
a native of their sunny climes. 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 259 

After all, it is not length of time in any experience of 
life that is significant, but intensity of feeling, and one 
finds himself really living more intensely in a few weeks 
in the Far West, in all its wonder world, than in years or 
decades of his accustomed rounds in Eastern cities. 

This entertainment of the Snake Dance is furnished by 
the Moki Indians at their camp some seventy miles over 
the desert from Flagstaff. There is no means of convey- 
ance save by wagons. The journey is over sagebrush and 
sand, enlivened by stones and cacti. The horses can 
make only slow progress. But the air is simply delightful 
and full of exhilaration, and the particular desert over 
which those who fare forth for this aesthetic spectacle 
must pass is the " Painted Desert," whose walls of rocks 
and mountains, brilliant in a dream of color, recede as they 
are approached, and thus the entire two days consumed in 
the journey are a perpetual delight to the eye. The way- 
farers camp out overnight, and during the five days' jour- 
ney — two days to go, two to return, and one to stay — 
their wants are, perforce, reduced to the most primitive. 
As the festivity lasts only twenty-eight minutes, it is cer- 
tainly spending a good deal of time and energy in order 
to behold so brief a spectacle. But one is told it is 
worth all the fatigue and the time. It is a religious rite 
of the Moki Indians, and is a prayer for rain. The descrip- 
tion of it is a literal one, for the dancers hold from one 
to three snakes — and rattlesnakes at that — in the mouth 



260 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

as they perform their strange gyrations. The dancers 
are the " braves," while the squaws chant a crooning 
accompaniment. 

One student of this Indian rite has said : 

" With the first glow in the east the priests hasten to the 
shrine of the Sun God with their offerings, the luminary 
himself being greeted with a prayer or with songs as he 
slowly emerges from behind the mesa in the Far East. Later 
the priests repair to their homes, and return to the kiva, 
bearing the ceremonial paraphernalia with which, early in 
the afternoon, they robe themselves in gorgeous array pre- 
paratory to the dance, which is given usually before the 
sun sets behind the San Francisco Peaks. 

" As the priests emerge from the kiva, where they wait in 
line until all have appeared, there is the hush of expectancy 
throughout the village ; the inhabitants now line the terraces, 
house-tops and every available spot around the dance plaza, 
all being attired in their gayest and brightest costumes. In 
single file and with measured tread comes the line of priests. 
Entering the plaza, they wheel about and begin a slow, short 
dance, the time of the step being accompanied by the shaking 
of rattles and by the singing of sacred songs. The dance is 
over all too soon, when the spectators return to their camps 
and the priests to the kiva, where great quantities of food 
have been brought for them. Finally, in a great feast, they 
break the fast, which, on the part of the chief priests, has 
been maintained for many days." 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 261 

It is quite by way of being love's labor lost to visit 
Arizona during that period of time devoted to the Moqui 
Festival. Apparently the entire population betake them- 
selves to this entertainment, journeying over the desert 
in their wagons, carrying with them their beds, their food, 
and every necessity, for except what they take with them 
they must do without. But as all the world, alas, cannot 
or does not dwell in Arizona, — a region in which any one 
sunset alone is worth the journey there, — and is thus 
deprived of the unique privilege of assisting at the Snake 
Dance, the next best thing, as a substitute, is to read the 
new work of George Wharton James (the author of " In 
and Around the Grand Canyon ") called " Indians of the 
Painted Desert Region." It is the very gateway to a wide 
and deeply interesting knowledge of Indian life in Arizona 
and its relation to advancing civilization. It is the pres- 
entation of a series of wonderful landscapes in a vivid 
manner of word-picturing. 

"Wild, weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the 
mind by the very name — Painted Desert," writes Mr. 
James. " The sound suggests a fabled rather than a real 
land. Surely it must be akin to Atlantis or the island 
of Circe or the place where the Cyclops lived. Is it not 
a land of enchantment and dreams, not a place for living 
men and women, Indians though they be ? " 

It seems that the Spaniards gave the name " El Pintato 
Deserto " — the Painted Desert. 



262 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

" Stand with me," writes Mr. James, u on the summit 
of one of the towering mountains that guard the region, 
and you will see such a landscape of color as exists no- 
where else in the world. It suggests the thought of God's 
original palette, where he experimented in color ere he 
decided how to paint the sunset, tint the sun-kissed hills 
at dawn, give red to the rose, green to the leaves, yellow 
to the sunflowers. . . . Look ! here is a vast field of al- 
kali, — fine, dazzling white. Yonder is a mural face half 
a thousand feet high and two hundred or more miles long. 
It is over a hundred miles away, but it reveals the rich 
glowing red of its walls, and between it and us are vast 
patches of pinks, grays, greens, carmines, blue, yellow, 
crimson, and brown, blending in every conceivable shade 
in a strange and grotesque yet fascinating manner. It 
is a rainbow petrified. It is a sunset painted on desert 
sands. " 

And here art and archaeology may revel. " History — 
exciting, thrilling, tragic — has been made in the Painted 
Desert region ; was being made centuries before Lief Eric- 
son landed on the shores of Vinland or John and Sebastian 
Cabot sailed from Bristol. ... In the Painted Desert 
region we find peoples strange, peculiar, and interesting, 
whose mythology is more fascinating than that of ancient 
Greece, and for aught we know to the contrary, may be 
equally ancient; whose ceremonies of to-day are more 
elaborate than those of a devout Catholic, more complex 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 263 

than those of a Hindoo Pantheist, more weird than those 
of a howling dervish of Turkistan. . . . One of the coun- 
tries comprised in the Painted Desert region is the theme 
of an epoch . . . reciting deeds as brave and heroic as 
those of the Greeks at Marathon or Thermopylae ; a poem 
recently discovered after having been buried in the tomb 
of oblivion for over two hundred years. Here are peoples 
to whom a written letter is witchcraft and sorcery, and 
yet who can read the heavens, interpret the writings of the 
clouds, deserts, and canons with unerring certainty. . . . 
A land it is of witchcraft and sorcery, of horror and dread 
of ghosts and goblins, of daily propitiations of fates and 
powers, and princes of darkness and air, at the very thought 
of whom withering injuries are sure to come." 

One is tempted to run on and on in quotation from 
this fascinating book, which depicts the strange life and 
the marvellous scenery in the country " where atmospheric 
colorings are so perfect and so divinely artistic that 
desolate deserts are made dreams of glory.'" 

Harriet Monroe, the Chicago poet, playwright, and 
most charming of essayists, who by no means limits her 
seances with the Muses to those particular hours in which 
she dons her singing robes, has given this prose-poem 
picture of a scene on the " Painted Desert " : 

"The rocks lay in belts as red as flame, yellow as gold, 
purple as violets, and they seemed to shine of their own 
light ; the City of Rocks, flaming red, and high as mountains ; 



264 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

one thousand foot walls sheer to the desert, all carved in 
needles, spires, towers, castles — the most tremendous thing 
on earth — there it lay ! " 

Of the sudden climatic changes of the desert Professor 
James says : 

et I have been almost frozen in its piercing snowstorms ; 
choked with sand in its whirling sandstorms ; wet through 
ere I could dismount from my horse in its fierce rainstorms ; 
terrified and temporarily blinded by the brilliancy of its 
lightning storms, and almost sunstruck by the scorching 
power of the sun in its desolate confines. . . . With my 
horses I have camped, again and again, waterless, on its arid 
and inhospitable rocks and sands, and prayed for morning, 
only to resume our exhausting journey in the fiercely beating 
rays of the burning sun ; longing for some pool of water, no 
matter how dirty, how stagnant, that our parched tongues 
and throats might feel the delight of swallowing something 
fluid. And last year (1902), in a journey to the home of 
the Hopi, my friends and I saw a part of this desert cov- 
ered with the waters of a fierce rainstorm as if it were an 
ocean, and the ' dry-wash ' of the Oraibi the scene of a flood 
that for hours equalled the rapids of the Colorado River. 
Desert though it is in the main, — barren, wild, and desolate, 
— here and there within its boundaries are fertile valleys, 
wooded slopes, and garden spots as rich as any on earth ; and 
the people who make their dwelling-place in this inhospitable 
land present characteristics as strongly contrasted as those 




MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 265 

of nature. Here are peoples of uncertain and mysterious 
origin whose history is preserved only in fantastic legends 
and traditional songs ; whose government is as pure and per- 
fect as that of the patriarchs, and possibly as ancient, and yet 
more republican than the most modern of existing govern- 
ments ; e peoples whose women build and own the houses, 
and whose men weave the garments of the women, knit the 
stockings of their own wear, and are as expert with needle 
and thread as their ancestors were with bow and arrow, 
obsidian-tipped spear, or stone battle-axe. . . . Here are 
peoples of stupendous religious beliefs. Peoples who can 
truthfully be designated as the most religious of the world, 
yet peoples as agnostic and sceptic, if not as learned as 
Hume, Voltaire, Spencer, and Ingersoll. Peoples to whom 
a written letter is witchcraft and sorcery, and yet who can 
read the heavens, interpret the writings of the woods, deserts, 
and canons with a certainty never failing. . . . Here are 
intelligent farmers who for centuries have scientifically irri- 
gated their lands and yet who cut off the ears of their burros 
to keep them from stealing corn. . . . Peoples who pray by 
machinery as the Burmese use their prayer wheels, and who 
'plant' supplications as a gardener plants trees and shrubs. 
. . . Peoples who are pantheists, sun worshippers, and snake 
dancers, yet who have churches and convents built with 
incredible labor and as extensive as any modern cathedral. 
Peoples whose conservatism in manners and religion sur- 
passes that of the veriest English Tories ; who for hundreds 
of years have steadily and successfully resisted all efforts to 
' convert' and change them, and who to-day are as firm in 



266 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

their faiths as ever. . . . Peoples to whom fraternal organi- 
zations and secret societies, for men and women alike, are as 
ancient as the mountains they inhabit, whose lodgerooms are 
more wonderful, and whose signs and passwords more complex, 
than those of any organization of civilized lands and modern 
times." 

One of the most weird and fascinating experiences in 
Arizona is a visit to " Assamanuda," the " Country of the 
Departed Spirits.'" This is the poetic name the Iroquois 
Indians give to the Painted Desert. This vast plain 
stretches away with gigantic horizontal columns, the re- 
mains of vast layers of sedimentary rock, from which the 
rains of prehistoric ages have washed away the connect- 
ing earth, and the columns are streaked and mottled with 
scarlet, due, it is said, to the oxidization of particles of 
feldspar in the granite of which these rocks are composed. 
Here may be witnessed in its perfection the Fata Mor- 
gana. In the air appear palaces, hanging gardens, and 
temples ; fountains and wonderful parks adorned with 
sculpture ; towers and turreted castles ; beautiful villas 
with terraced lawns and cascades of water thrown high 
in the air ; rose gardens and hills, where the deer and the 
antelope are seen ; all these and other visions of loveliness 
are pictured on the air in a perfection of light and shading. 
It is not difficult to fancy that one is really gazing into 
the ethereal world, beyond the pearly gates, and gazing 
indeed into "the country of departed spirits." 







8UWARA (GIANT CACTUS), SALT RIVER VALLEY, ARIZONA 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 267 

All Northern and Northeastern Arizona are comprised 
in the region, — Nature's picture gallery. Dr. Newberry, 
the geologist, who explored all the regions east of the 
upper Colorado as far as the junction of the Green and 
the Grand rivers, thus pictures one view of the plateau : 

" Directly south the view was bounded by the high and dis- 
tant mesas of the Navajo country, succeeded in the southwest 
by the still more lofty battlements of the great white mesa 
formerly seen from the Moqui pueblos. On these high table- 
lands the outlines were not only distinctly visible, but grand 
and impressive at the distance of a hundred miles. Nearly 
west a great gap opened in the high tablelands through 
which the San Juan flows to its junction with the Colorado. 
The distance between the mesa walls is perhaps ten miles, 
and scattered over it are castle-like buttes and slender towers, 
none of which can be less than a thousand feet in height, 
their sides absolutely perpendicular and their forms wonder- 
ful imitations of architectural art. Illuminated by the set- 
ting sun the outlines of these singular objects come out sharp 
and distinct with such exact similitude to art that we could 
hardly resist conviction that we beheld the walls and towers 
of some °~?ient Cyclopean city, hitherto undiscovered." 

Every journey in Arizona seems to lead on into an 
enchanted world. The gray valley road, the curious mesa 
formations that stretch into infinite distances ; the mystic 
apparition in the Estrella range of the Montezuma faces ; 
the ruins of Casa Grande, which tell their tale of a massive 



268 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

city that once existed here ; the ruins on the Rio Verde ; 
the mounds and shafts discovered belonging to some pre- 
historic civilization ; the ancient watch tower ; the painted 
rocks, with their extensive hieroglyphics, — all speak to the 
archaeologist in a language that fascinates the imagina- 
tion. Its three greatest features — the Grand Canon, 
regarding which there is neither speech nor language ; 
the Petrified Forest, and that Submerged Star known 
as "Meteorite Mountain " — would alone make it the 
world mecca of scientists ; to say nothing of the strange 
ruins of prehistoric peoples, of an unearthly beauty of 
atmospheric coloring, and of the contemporary scientific 
interest of the great Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, 
or the splendid progress and development of the people. 
It might well have been of this marvellous country that 
Emerson wrote : 

" And many a thousand summers 
My gardens ripened well, 
And light from meliorating stars 
With firmer glory fell. 

" I wrote the past in characters 
Of rock and fire the scroll, 
The building in the coral sea, 
The planting of the coal. 

" And thefts from satellites and rings 
And broken stars I drew, 
And out of spent and aged things 
I formed the world anew. " 



MAGIC, ETC., OF ARIZONA 269 

What is the world that shall be in this mystic Arizona ? 
What, indeed, was the world that has been there ? Im- 
agination falters alike before the stupendous marvels of its 
past, the picturesque splendors of its future. Its scenic 
grandeur will make Arizona a world centre; the nations 
from afar will make their pilgrimage to the sublimest 
marvels of all nature's revelations to this planet. Here 
will be sought the counsel of the gods. The message of 
the prehistoric past and of the undiscovered future will 
" give the law of night and day " in wonderful Arizona, 
the land of magic and mystery. 



270 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 



CHAPTER IX 

THE PETRIFIED FOREST AND THE 
METEORITE MOUNTAIN 

" A spell is laid on sod and stone, 
Night and day are tampered with. 
Every quality and pith 
Surcharged and sultry with a power 
That works its will on age and hour.'''' 

Emerson 

A June day in the Petrified Forests of Arizona is an 
experience that can never fade from memory. Every ex- 
cursion into this strange, uncanny realm of Arizona, which 
is an empire in its area ; every journey one takes, every 
trail he follows, leads into strange and fascinating locality ; 
and Adamana, the gateway to the Petrified Forests, has its 
own spellbinding power for the tourist. Adamana con- 
sists of a water tank, the station, and two bungalows, in 
one of which very comfortable entertainment is offered, 
and in the other of which dwells a character whom all 
travellers meet, — Adam Hanna, a distant relative of the 
late Mark Hanna, the original settler of this region. 
For a long time the place was known as Adam Hanna's, 
and when with advancing civilization this designation 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 271 

became too colloquial for an up-to-date twentieth-century 
world, the elision of two or three letters gave the present 
attractive name, — Adamana. 

To leave the comfortable ease of a Pullman sleeper at 
the witching hour of five in the morning to stop over at 
Adamana and visit the Petrified Forest requires a degree 
of fortitude beyond that usually calculated. Left to one's 
self, one would emulate the example of the man who jour- 
neyed to the north pole to see a sunrise that occurred only 
three days in the year. On the first two mornings he re- 
fused to rise on the plea of the further extension of his 
opportunities ; on the third, when his servant reminded 
him that it was the " last call," he turned over and philo- 
sophically remarked that he would come again next year. 
But the dusky porter allows the tourist no such margin 
for reflection, and one finds himself standing in some won- 
derful place spellbound by the witchery of the desert, and 
the long train vanishing in the distance, almost before he 
knows whether he has exchanged the land of dreams for 
the land of day and daylight realities, — for this weird and 
mystic panorama of the infinite desert, with the bluest of 
turquoise skies already lighted by the blazing splendor of 
the June sunrise, and the grotesque, uncanny buttes scat- 
tered at intervals all over that vast plain. The intense 
silence was unbroken save by the voice and footstep of the 
man representing the little bungalow termed the Forest 
Hotel. Contrary to one's preconceived ideas of an Arizona 



272 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

desert, the morning was cold, and the blazing fire and hot 
coffee were most grateful. But where was the " Petrified 
Forest"? one marvelled. Away on the horizon gleamed 
an evanescent, palpitating region of shimmering color. 
Yet this was not the " quarry of jewels,"" but the " Bad 
Lands," which have at least one redeeming virtue, what- 
ever their vices, — that of producing the most aerial and 
fairy-like color effects imaginable. 

It is astonishing how swiftly one relinquishes precon- 
ceived ideas of living and learns to get on without electric 
bells, long-distance telephones, and elaborate conveniences 
in general, even to the " prepared air," strained through 
thin layers of cloth, as the latest superfine condition 
added to a great New York hotel, and adapts one's self 
to a mode of life in which a simple but very clean room, 
primitive food, wonderful air, good, kind people, and a 
petrified forest to amuse him, take the place of the 
complex and elaborate life of the great Eastern cities. 
At Adamana one finds himself seventy-five miles from 
Gallup, New Mexico, the nearest town of any importance, 
from which all household supplies must be ordered. 
When the coffee gives out, for instance, seventy-five miles 
from a lemon ; and when a Sunday and a holiday have 
almost followed each other, thus delaying all orders, one 
has then the most delightful and spacious opportunities 
for experimenting on the simple life. The desert offers 
other things ; and while these do not include the menu of 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 273 

Sherry's, for instance, they do include certain allurements 
for which the country might be searched in vain, as they 
only exist on the Colorado desert. The quality of the air, 
the color of the sky, the marvel of color vistas, — all make 
up a new world in which one finds himself fairly question- 
ing regarding his own identity. Nor has he any apparent 
test by which to determine — 

" If I am I, as I do hope I be." 

Perhaps, indeed, he does not so tenaciously cling to 
that which he remembers of himself yesterday, and is 
rather interested, on the whole, in accepting some pos- 
sibly new transformation of his being. The locality 
seems to him sufficiently well indicated as being, accord- 
ing to his first impression, simply somewhere in the magic 
and witchery of space. This address might not be ac- 
cepted by the government postal service, but even that 
heretofore indispensable matter in some way fades into 
comparative insignificance. What does one who has an 
Arizona sky, and a bewildering shimmer of color afar on 
the horizon that might be 

" A painted ship upon a painted ocean " 

or almost anything else, — what does he want of the 
sublunary detail of eight postal deliveries a day, begin- 
ning at half-past seven in the morning, with his first 
dawn of returning consciousness, and ending with mid- 
night, when he is, very likelv, summoned out of his sleep 

'18 



274 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

by the rap of a bellboy delivering more mail, — more, 

— as if he had not been under an avalanche of it all 

day and had sought refuge in dreamland for the very 

purpose of escaping the vigilance of his national postal 

service. But one may as well accept the fact as one from 

which there is no appeal, that in the heart of civilization 

he cannot escape its burdens and its penalties. He can 

only evade them by going to — Adamana, for instance ; 

Adamana, the metropolis of the railroad water-tank, the 

station, and two bungalows. Even these are too many. 

One bungalow is enough. He cannot repose in two at 

the same time; and as for neighbors and news, — has 

he not the stars and the sunsets? What does Emily 

Dickinson say ? — 

" The only news I know 
Is bulletins all day 
From Immortality." 

There are no birds to 

" . . . carol undeceiving things," 

as in Colorado ; but there is, instead, intense silence, — a 
silence so absolutely intense as to be, by a paradox, fairly 
vocal ; and if one does but catch the music of the spheres 
for which he finds himself listening, it must be that his 
powers of hearing are defective. One recalls the lines: 

** Who loves the music of the spheres 
And lives on earth, must close his ears 
To many voices that he hears." 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 275 

The " many voices " are stilled ; one has left them at 
least seventy-five miles away, — in Gallup, for instance ! 
Gallup, that for the time prefigures itself to him as his 
New York, his Paris, his London. It is the source of 
all his possible supplies ; and that it does not assume 
an overwhelming importance is simply because he does 
not want any supplies of the particular nature that 
Gallup — or Paris — can furnish. He has achieved some- 
thing more than the power to satisfy all his (former) 
multitudinous wants ; he has eliminated them. 

To be sure, the Chinese have a proverb that it is not 
worth while to cut off one's feet to save buying shoes. 
Yet, if instead of depriving himself of feet he has 
achieved wings, why, manifestly, there is no need of 
shoes. There are, when one comes to think of it, a 
vast number of things in our late civilization for which 
there is no special need. 

" For a cap and bells our lives we pay ; 
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking : 
'T is heaven alone that is given away ; 
'T is only God may be had for the asking. " 

In fact, when one comes to reflect upon the aspects of 
his former life (as he sees them in mental panorama from 
Adamana), he can only arrive at the conclusion that life 
is unnecessarily choked and submerged under an ever- 
increasing burden of things. Emerson, of course, whose 
insight saw the universe as a crystal sphere which revealed 



276 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

to his vision its entire working mechanism, — Emerson long 

since announced that 

" Things are in the saddle 
And ride mankind." 

Why should one be ridden by things ? Why should 
he enslave himself, — mortgage his entire powers of achieve- 
ment, such as they are, to pay his bills to the butcher, 
the baker, and the candlestick maker ? Is not the life 
more than meat, and the spirit than fine raiment ? So 
he may dream for the moment, gazing meditatively at the 
water- tank, the station, and the two bungalows that com- 
prise Adamana. Good for that day only, at least, is its 
contrast to the bewildering din of entrepots, of ports, of 
custom-houses, of the general din and warfare of the 
world he has left behind. 

Holbrook, the other station for the Petrified Forests, 
is twenty miles away. Flagstaff, a very thriving and in- 
teresting Arizona town, famous as the site of the Observa- 
tory of Prof. Percival Lowell of Boston, is one hundred 
and fifty miles to the west ; and one hour of railroad 
journey beyond Flagstaff is Williams, the town from 
which runs the branch railroad to the Grand Canon over 
the rolling mesas crowned with the beautiful peaks of the 
San Francisco mountains, a distance of sixty -three miles, 
the journey occupying three hours. The nearest town 
to Adamana station, in which a daily paper is published, 
is Albuquerque, in New Mexico, which is nine hundred 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 277 

and thirty-five miles to the east, almost as far as from 
New York to Chicago. The metropolis to which this 
region looks as its nearest large city is Los Angeles, 
twenty-six hours distant. So here one is out of the 
world, so to speak, — 

" The world forgetting, by the world forgot," — 

with the vast rolling mesas, with sandstone cliffs offering 
an uncanny landscape before the eye, with the eternal 
blue of Arizona skies bending above, with a silence so 
deep brooding over the desert that one might well feel 
himself on the moon rather than on earth, — a silence only 
broken by the semi-daily rush of the long overland trains 
and occasional freight lines that pass. 

John Muir, the famous California naturalist, explorer, 
and author of valuable books on the Western parks, passed 
the winter of 1905-06 at Adamana with his two daughters, 
the Misses Wanda and Helen Muir, and it is he who has 
discovered the new Petrified Forest which he calls the 
" Blue Forest " — all the specimens having a deep blue 
tone, while the other three are simply quarries of red 
moss, agate, amethyst, topaz, pale rose crystals gleaming 
against a smoky green ground. The landscape effect of 
the " Bad Lands " from the little bungalow known as 
the Forest Hotel is of fairy-like enchantment. A shimmer 
of rose and gray and gold and emerald, it gleams on the 
horizon. Lighted by a blazing sunset, it might well be 



278 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

the gates of a New Jerusalem. Anything more exquisite, 

and more ineffably ethereal in coloring, one might journey 

far to seek. 

" Moreover, something is, or seems, 
That touches us like mystic gleams, 
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams." 

These lines may, perchance, come echoing around one 
in the air as he loiters at night on the low, long piazza, 
while the myriad meteors of Arizona skies blaze their way 
through the transparent air and a sky full of stars con- 
tends with the moon for brilliancy ; the unearthly, deli- 
cate, ethereal coloring of the " Bad Lands "" gleaming 
resplendent on the distant horizon. 

If the wanderer has fallen upon particularly fortunate 
days in his horoscope and found Miss Wanda Muir — her 
quaint name coming from her mother, the daughter of a 
Polish nobleman — to drive him out to this marvellous 
" forest ,1 of stone, he will have a pleasure enhanced by 
interesting conversation. A graduate of Berkeley College 
in California, and the constant companion of her father in 
his wanderings, Miss Muir is indeed an ideal guide, and 
under her hand one June morning the two horses sped 
along over the rough, stony ground at a pace to set every 
fibre tingling. One of the features of the Arizona desert 
is the arroyo, a dry stream, a ready-made river, so to speak, 
minus the water. Some of these even have a stream of 
flowing water, only it is under the bed of the river rather 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 279 

than on top of it, for Arizona is the land of magic and 
wonder and of a general reversal of accepted conditions. 

" Sometimes in driving out here, 11 said Miss Muir, " a 
cloudburst comes up while we are in the Petrified Forests, 
and on returning the horses have to swim this dry stream. 
Once the water was so high it came into the wagon. Not 
infrequently, when we go out to the forest, some one comes 
dashing after us on horseback to warn us to get back as 
quickly as possible, or the torrents of water from a sudden 
cloudburst will cut us off altogether, perhaps for a day and 
a night. 11 The pleasing uncertainty of life in Arizona may 
be realized from this danger of being suddenly drowned 
in the arid sands of a desert, and being confronted with a 
sudden Lodore that descends from the heavens on a mid- 
summer noon. But, as one is constantly saying to himself, 
Arizona is the land of surprises. No known laws of 
meteorology, or of any other form of science, hold good 
here. The mountain peak transforms itself into the bot- 
tom of a sea, and the sea suddenly upheaves itself in air 
and figures as a mountain. Arizona is nature^ kaleido- 
scope ; it is the land of transformation. 

Of the three petrified forests, each separated by a mile 
or two, the first is reached by a drive of some six miles, 
while the third is more than twice as far. The second is 
the largest and most elaborate, and in the aggregate 
they cover an area of over two thousand acres. The 
ground is the high rolling mesas, and over it are scattered, 



280 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

" thick as leaves in Vallombrosa," the jewel-like fragments 
of mighty trees in deposits that are the wonder of the 
scientist. From the huge fallen tree trunks, many of these 
being over two hundred feet in length and of similar pro- 
portions in diameter, to the mere chips and twigs, the 
forests are transmuted into agate and onyx and chalcedony. 
Numbers of these specimens contain perfect crystals. 
They are vivid and striking in color, — in rich Byzantine 
red, deep greens and purples and yellow, white and trans- 
lucent, or dark in all color blendings. Great blocks of 
agate cover many parts of the forest. Hundreds of entire 
trees are seen. When cut transversely these logs show the 
bark, the inner fibre, and veining as perfectly as would a 
living tree. And over all these fallen monarchs of a pre- 
historic forest bends the wonderful turquoise sky of Arizona, 
and the air is all the liquid gold of the intense sunshine. 

At Tiffany's in New York may be seen huge slabs and 
sections of this petrified wood under high polish. A fine 
exhibit of it was made at the Paris exposition in 1900, 
and a specimen of it was presented to Rodin, the great 
sculptor, who was incredulous of the possibility that this 
block, apparently of onyx, could have been wood. Through 
all the forests are these strange rock formations called 
buttes, rising in the most weird shapes from the sand and 
stones and sagebrush of the vast desert. What a treasure- 
ground of antiquity ! This region, which seems a plain, 
is yet higher than the top of Mount Washington, and the 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 281 

altitude insures almost perpetual coolness. Scientists seem 
to agree in the theory that the petrified forests are a debat- 
able phenomenon whose origin eludes any final conclusion. 
It is possible that some mighty sea suddenly arose — per- 
haps as the present Salton Sea in Southern California — 
and engulfed them. The land is partly the " bad lands " 
and partly a sandy plain covered with petrifactions. The 
third forest contains hundreds of unbroken tree trunks, of 
which some are over two hundred feet in length. Many 
of these are partly imbedded in the earth. 

All around this high plateau rise on the horizon sur- 
rounding cliffs to the height of one hundred and fifty and 
more feet, serrated into ravines and gorges, variegated with 
the sandstone formations in all their shimmer of colors, and 
indicating that this basin was once the bottom of a sea. 

It is the paradise of the ethnologist as well as of the 
geologist. Besides cliff ruins and hieroglyphics, almost 
anywhere, by chance, one may find traces of submerged 
walls, and following these, a man with an ordinary spade 
may dig up prehistoric pottery, skeletons, beads, rings, 
and occasionally necklaces. The pottery, both in design 
and in scheme of decoration, shows a high degree of 
civilization. Who were these prehistoric peoples who had 
built their pueblos and created their implements and 
pottery and were already old when Plymouth Rock was 
new? Much of the symbolic creation here still awaits 
its interpreter. 



282 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

From these millions of tons of glistening, shining 
blocks and segments and tree trunks the tourist is not 
allowed to carry away specimens carte blanche, as form- 
erly. The Petrified Forests are now a government reser- 
vation, although not yet one of the government parks. 
Small specimens, within a reasonable amount, are per- 
mitted the tourist as souvenirs. 

The Petrified Forests are quarries rather than forests ; 
the great fallen logs, branches, and chips, lying prostrate 
on the ground, are seen glowing and gleaming like jewels. 
So far as the eye can reach there is not a human habita- 
tion. Over the infinite stretch of sand and rocks bends 
the bluest of skies, and here and there are prehistoric In- 
dian mines, and one ledge of cliffs on which are strange 
and as yet undeciphered hieroglyphics. The graves of 
the prehistoric inhabitants of this region are numerous, 
each containing rare and choice specimens of pottery 
which are dug out intact. This region seems to have 
been once thickly populated. The remains of pueblos 
are numerous. Skeletons are constantly being found. 

Although the visitor is not allowed to carry away with 
him a trainload or so of specimens, he may still be per- 
mitted a beautiful cross-section of an entire tree trunk, 
showing all the veins of the wood and the bark, a speci- 
men thin enough to be portable, and worthy a place in 
any cabinet of curiosities, besides many chips showing all 
the range of beautiful colors which abound in Chalcedony 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 283 

Park. In this park lies a vast fallen tree trunk that 
forms a natural bridge over a chasm, — a bridge that 
seems to be of solid agate. These forests are among the 
great scenic wonders of the world, and if they were in the 
heart of the Himalayas or some other especially inacces- 
sible spot, all good Americans would hasten to visit them. 
But our own wonderful and incomparable scenic grandeur 
is neglected. These "Petrified Forests " are the marvel 
of the geologist. What has happened, in all the phe- 
nomena of nature, to produce this incredible spectacle? 
Many scientific men believe that these forests did not 
grow on the spot where they now would lie prostrate, 
but were swept down by floods when this region was a 
vast inland sea, and that they became imbedded in the 
sand ; that then the sea vanished and volcanic eruptions 
poured over, and the wood was hardened to rock. Again, 
a flood of water passed over and washed away the sand 
and silt, and the erosion left these thousands of acres of 
petrifactions exposed on the surface as now ; and thus, after 
millenniums have passed, we have these quarries of chal- 
cedony and agate, onyx, cornelian, topaz, and amethyst. 

Every evening at Adamana disclosed a sky panorama of 
kaleidoscopic wonder. Afar to the horizon the Bad Lands 
shimmered in a faint dream of colors under the full moon. 
The stars seemed to hang midway in the air, and fre- 
quent meteors blazed through the vast, mysterious space. 
Adamana is nine hours from Albuquerque, the metrop- 



284 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

olis of New Mexico, and five hours distant from Flagstaff, 
to the west. All the thousands of acres of desert lands 
about require only water to render them richly productive. 
But water is unattainable. There are no mountain ranges 
near enough to produce water storage, and unless the 
twentieth-century scientists discover some way of creating 
rain, these arid regions must remain as they are. Yet 
even here American life and energy and progress are seen. 
The scattered settlers unite in maintaining public schools 
six months in the year, and with only from twelve to 
twenty pupils the teacher is paid from seventy-five to 
eighty dollars a month, — more than twice the salary paid 
in the country schools in New England. In the little 
bungalow here at Adamana, where Mr. Stevenson, the 
government guardian of the Petrified Forests, makes 
tourists strangely comfortable during their desert so- 
journ, one finds a piano, a well-selected little library, and 
young people whose command of the violin and piano offer 
music that is by no means unacceptable. The children 
get music lessons — no one knows how ; they are eager 
for any instruction in language, and acquire French and 
Spanish in some measure, and in all ways the national 
ambition is sustained. From Albuquerque comes a daily 
paper, and only one day behind date the Los Angeles 
papers arrive. One is not out of the world (alas !) even 
on the Arizona desert. 

It is a new world in itself, — the desert of Arizona. No 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 285 

region on the earth is more diversified, more intensely in- 
teresting. This desert comprises mountains and plains ; 
it contains that one supreme scenic wonder of the world, 
the Grand Canon ; in it are Canon Diablo and the Me- 
teorite Mountain. Within its area also is the "Tonto 
Basin," — an incalculable chaos of isolated and unrelated 
cliffs, and crags of mountains peaks that have lost their 
mountains, and general wreck and ruin. One might fancy 
that at the end of creation, when the universe itself was 
completed, all the chips and fragments and debris in gen- 
eral were hurled into the Tonto Basin, — only that, of 
course, the universe was never " made," but is always in 
the making ; only that the physical configuration of the 
entire earth is always in process of transformation into 
new aspects, and nowhere is this progress of the ages more 
extraordinarily in evidence than in Arizona. 

Leaving the Petrified Forest for the Grand Canon, one 
has a wonderful journey of six hours to Williams, and 
thence three hours over the branch road to Bright Angel, 
where the new and magnificent hotel, "El Tovar," capti- 
vates the travellers, and from which a stage runs to Grand 
View, thirteen miles away, where Vishnu Temple, the Coli- 
seum, Solomon's Temple, and other wonders of the mar- 
vellous sandstone architecture, in the depths of the Grand 
Canon are viewed. 

In waiting for the train on the branch road running 
from Williams to the Grand Canon over the beautiful 



286 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

San Franciscan mountains, the hour of waiting at Williams 
is made a delight by a most unique and interesting curi- 
osity shop under the splendid Harvey management, where 
all kinds of natural curiosities and Indian and Mexican 
things are shown. The walls are hung with bright-hued 
blankets and rugs, the ceiling is decorated and draped, 
easy-chairs and sofas abound, and these tend to make the 
journey a kind of royal progress. 

In 1540 Pedro de Tovar, one of the officers who accom- 
panied Coronado through his great expedition, passed 
through Arizona. Even then an extinct civilization was 
already old. The ruins of the dwellings of those prehis- 
toric people abound near Flagstaff. In the i-ecesses of 
Walnut Canon there are found cliff-dwellings in great 
numbers. "Some of these are in ruins, and have but a 
narrow shelf of the once broad floor of solid rock left 
to evidence their extreme antiquity. Others are almost 
wholly intact, having stubbornly resisted the weathering 
of time. Nothing but fragments of pottery now remain of 
the many quaint implements and trinkets that character- 
ized these dwellings at the time of their discovery. 

u Fixed like swallows' nests upon the face of a precipice, 
approachable from above or below only by deliberate and 
cautious climbing, these dwellings have the appearance of 
fortified retreats rather than habitual abodes. That there 
was a time in the remotest past when warlike peoples of 
mysterious origin passed southward over this plateau is 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 287 

generally credited. And the existence of the cliff-dwellings 
is ascribed to the exigencies of that dark period when the 
inhabitants of the plateau, unable to cope with the superior 
energy, intelligence, and numbers of the descending hordes A 
devised these unassailable retreats. All their quaintness and 
antiquity cannot conceal the deep pathos of their being, for 
tragedy is written all over these poor hovels hung between 
earth and sky. Their builders hold no smallest niche in 
recorded history. Their aspirations, their struggles, and their 
fate are all unwritten, save on these crumbling stones, which 
are their sole monument and meagre epitaph. Here once 
they dwelt. They left no other print on time," 

Flagstaff is a pleasant mountain town some seven thou- 
sand feet above sea level, and is particularly fortunate in 
being the site of the Lowell Observatory, founded by 
Professor Percival Lowell of Boston, which brings eminent 
astronomers and scientists to the place. In the Lowell 
Observatory some of the best work in modern science is 
being accomplished, and Professor Lowell and his staff 
have for some years been devoting themselves to the 
special study of Mars. Flagstaff was selected for the site 
of the observatory on account of the singularly clear and 
still air of Arizona. It is an atmosphere almost without 
vibration. Never were distances more curiously deceiving 
to the eye than in Arizona. A point that is apparently 
only a few yards away may be, in reality, at a distance of 
two miles. Professor Lowell and his staff have, therefore, 



288 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

exceptional facilities for their work, and Mr. Carl Otto 
Lampland, the stellar photographer of the staff, has taken 
impressions of Mars that seem to leave little doubt in the 
minds of experts that canals on that planet reflect them- 
selves by the camera. This achievement is recognized by 
astronomers everywhere as marking an epoch in the study 
of Mars and as fairly closing the argument regarding the 
possibility of canals on that body by bringing their con- 
struction there as an unquestionable fact. It was Schia- 
parelli, the Italian astronomer, who first observed what 
he believed were canals on Mars. His report was received 
with incredulity ; but his theory has been so reinforced and 
supported by actual results of observations since then that 
it is now generally accepted. Early in the decade of 1880-90 
Professor Lowell began a special study at Flagstaff with his 
fine twenty-four-inch telescope, but it was in May, 1905, 
that the first results of real significance were obtained. The 
light about Mars is said to be faint, and the vibrations in 
the air, though less in Arizona than is usual elsewhere, still 
produced disturbing effects on the plate. It is said that 
Mr. Lampland overcame this difficulty after a long series 
of experiments, " by using a diaphragm on the telescope, 
cutting down the aperture from twenty-four inches to 
twelve inches, as a rule. Though this diaphragming of a 
photographic len c is not new, this was the first time it was 
applied to a glass as large as twenty-four inches in diameter 
and for such faint objects. Hitherto astronomers have 



THE PETRIFIED FOREST 289 

been more concerned with availing themselves of the light- 
gathering power of the large lenses. It was a distinct ad- 
vance, and is the one step to which the largest share of the 
credit is due of successfully photographing the canals. 11 

In the vestibule of the Institute of Technology in 
Boston were shown in the spring of 1906 a number of 
these photographs. To the uninitiated they merely pre- 
sented a black ground with white lines faintly denned. 
Professor Lowell says that the special significance of the 
photographs lies in the fact that they corroborate the 
results shown by other photographers of Mars, and that 
they also corroborate the methods. That the sensitive 
plate of the camera will record a star never visible 
through even the strongest glass, and thus prove its 
existence, is a wonderful fact in stellar photography. 

Canon Diablo is one of the volcanic phenomena of Ari- 
zona, — a narrow chasm some two hundred and fifty feet 
deep, several miles long, and five or six hundred feet wide, 
which the Santa Fe road crosses on a wonderful steel spider- 
web bridge a few miles before reaching Flagstaff. It is one 
of the curious things for which the tourist is watching. 
For so intensely interesting is the entire journey westward 
after leaving La Junta in Colorado, that the ' traveller 
who realizes the wonderland through which he is passing 
is very much on the alert for the landscape. 

Between Adamana and Flagstaff is a strangely interest- 
ing country. Here is Meteorite Mountain, where evidently 

19 



290 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

a huge meteor fell into the earth with terrific force, up- 
heaving all the surrounding crust and thus producing a 
mountain with an enormous cavity in its centre. For five 
years men have been digging here to find the meteor. 
They have excavated huge fragments of it. The vast 
hollow crater where the meteorite is supposed to have 
fallen into the ground is a mile wide. In some frag- 
ments of the meteor which were submitted to Sir Wil- 
liam Crookes for examination that great scientist found 
diamonds in small but unmistakable quantities. 

The Meteorite Mountain is some ten miles south of 
Canon Diablo, from which station the traveller may drive 
to this phenominal cavity, which is a mile in diameter. 
Within recent months shafts are being projected into the 
earth to discover, if possible, whether the meteoric theory is 
the true one. More and more, with every year, is science 
undertaking to " pluck out the heart of the mystery " 
in this problematic Arizona. Prof. G. K. Gilbert, of the 
United States Geological Survey, has made a special study 
of this phenomenon, and it is he who experimented with 
a magnetic test, assuming that if an enormous meteorite 
had hurled itself into the earth until it was buried past 
excavation, the great mass of metallic iron would still re- 
spond to the test, and furnish unmistakable proof of its 
presence if subjected to magnetic attraction. A scientific 
writer who has recently made a study of Meteorite Moun- 
tain thus reports the conditions : 



METEORITE MOUNTAIN 291 

"The mountain is about two hundred feet high, and there 
are a few stunted pines about its forbidding looking slopes. 
Going to the top of this mountain, over huge masses of 
strange-looking rock, one will find a great depression, gen- 
erally called the crater, though there are no evidences of its 
volcanic formation. This crater is a huge bowl one mile 
across and six hundred feet deep. The winds of the desert 
have blown much sand into the crater, evidently covering the 
bottom of the depression to a depth of many feet. There is 
a level space of about forty acres in the bottom of the crater. 

" When the gigantic meteor fell hissing into the earth, if 
it ever did so, the concussion must have been terrific. And 
in this connection it is interesting to note that the Indians 
near by have a legend about a huge star falling out of the 
heavens and dazzling the tribe with its brightness. Then 
there was a great shock and sudden darkness, and ever since 
then the Indians have regarded Meteorite Mountain with 
awe. Some idea of the action of the meteorite can be 
obtained by throwing a stone into the mud. When the 
meteorite buried itself far into the earth the sides were 
heaved up, leaving a rim-like circle about the depression. 
As the meteorite sank into the earth it must have crushed 
layers of red sandstone and limestone. It is believed that 
the white sand found in the crater and on the sides of the 
mountain is from the sandstone pulverized by the meteor in 
its descent. This sand was blown skyward and afterward 
settled down on the mountain, covering it thickly. No sand 
like it is to be found near the mountain. 



292 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

" Men searching the ground surrounding the mountain for 
a distance of several miles find small meteorites. Several of 
these weigh as much as one thousand pounds, and others 
weigh only a fraction of an ounce. The largest pieces were 
found furthest from the mountain. These meteorites have 
been proved to be practically non-magnetic. This may ex- 
plain why the immense body of iron in the buried meteor has 
not shown any magnetic properties. Needles taken to the 
mountain have not shown the presence of any great magnetic 
attraction, and this fact puzzled scientists until it was found 
that the fragments found near the mountain did not possess 
magnetism. 

" Another interesting discovery is the presence of what is 
called ( iron shale ' near the mountain. These are fragments 
of burned or c dead ' iron. They might have been broken 
from the meteorite at the time of the terrific impact, or they 
might have been snapped from the larger body owing to a 
sudden cooling process. Inasmuch as the Canon Diablo 
country was at one time an immense inland sea, another 
interesting theory has been brought forth, — that the meteor 
fell into this sea, and that the great number of splinters of 
iron in the neighborhood were caused by the sudden cooling 
of the molten mass. It has been discovered that these small 
meteorites contain diamonds." 

In the immediate vicinity of Meteorite Mountain several 
tons of meteoric fragments have been found of which 
Prof. George Wharton James has one, weighing about 
a ton, on his lawn at his charming residence in Pasadena. 



METEORITE MOUNTAIN 293 

There are also found in this vicinity large amounts of shale 
which scientists pronounce analogous to the meteorite, but 
" dead " ; yet this shale is highly magnetic and possesses 
polarity, — one of the most mysterious and incomprehen- 
sible properties of electricity. 

Professor Gilbert did not meet success when he tried 
the magnetic test, and in discussing this matter in an 
address on " The Origin of Hypotheses," delivered before 
the Geological Society in Washington last year, he said : 

" Still another contribution to the subject, while it does 
not increase the number of hypotheses, is nevertheless im- 
portant in that it tends to diminish the weight of the magnetic 
evidence and thus to reopen the question which Mr. Baker 
and I supposed we had settled. Our fellow-member, Mr. 
Edwin E. Howell, through whose hands much of the meteoric 
iron had passed, points out that each of the iron masses, 
great and small, 'o in itself a complete individual. They 
have none of the characters that would be found if they had 
been broken one from another, and yet, as they are all of 
one type and all reached the earth within a small district, it 
must be supposed that they were originally connected in 
some way. 

" Reasoning by analogy from the characters of other mete- 
oric bodies, he infers that the irons were all included in a 
large mass of some different material, either crystalline rock, 
such as constitutes the class of meteorites called ( stony,' or 
else a compound of iron and sulphur, similar to certain nodules 



294 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

discovered inside the iron masses when sawn in two. Neither 
of these materials is so enduring as iron, and the fact that 
they are not now found on the plain does not prove their 
original absence. Moreover, the plain is strewn in the vicin- 
ity of the crater with bits of limonite, a mineral frequently 
produced by the action of air and water on iron sulphides, 
and this material is much more abundant than the iron. If 
it be true that the iron masses were thus embedded, like 
plums in an astral pudding, the hypothetic buried star might 
have great size and yet only small power to attract the mag- 
netic needle. Mr. Howell also proposes a qualification of 
the test by volumes, suggesting that some of the rocks be- 
neath the buried star might have been condensed by the 
shock so as to occupy less space. 

" These considerations are eminently pertinent to the 
study of the crater and will find appropriate place in any 
comprehensive discussion of its origin • but the fact which is 
peculiarly worthy of note at the present time is their ability 
to unsettle a conclusion that was beginning to feel itself 
secure. This illustrates the tentative nature not only of 
the hypotheses of science, but of what science calls its 
results. 

"The method of hypotheses, and that method is the 
method of science, founds its explanations of nature wholly 
on observed facts, and its results are ever subject to the 
limitations imposed by imperfect observation. However 
grand, however widely accepted, however useful its conclu- 
sions, none is so sure that it cannot be called into question 



METEORITE MOUNTAIN 295 

by a newly discovered fact. In the domain of the world's 
knowledge there is no infallibility." 

Sir William Crookes has been deeply interested in the 
phenomenon of Meteorite Mountain, which must take rank 
with the Petrified Forests and even with the Grand Canon 
as one of the marvels of Arizona. The meteoric shower 
which seems to have accompanied the falling of the 
huge meteorite — if the theory of its existence is true — 
has recorded its traces over a radius of more than five 
miles from the crater-like cavity. The experiment of 
Dr. Foote is thus described : 

" An ardent mineralogist, the late Dr. Foote, in cutting 
a section of this meteorite, found the tools were injured by 
something vastly harder than metallic iron, and an emery 
wheel used in grinding the iron had been ruined. He exam- 
ined the specimen chemically, and soon after announced to 
the scientific world that the Canon Diablo Meteorite con- 
tained black and transparent diamonds. This startling dis- 
covery was afterwards verified by Professors Fried el and 
Moissan, who found that the Canon Diablo Meteorite con- 
tained the three varieties of carbon, — diamond (transparent 
and black), graphite, and amorphous carbon. Since this reve- 
lation the search for diamonds in meteorites has occupied the 
attention of chemists all over the world. 

" Here, then, we have absolute proof of the truth of the 
meteoric theory. Under atmospheric influences the iron 
would rapidly oxidize and rust away, coloring the adjacent 



296 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

soil with red oxide of iron. The meteoric diamonds would 
be unaffected and left on the surface to be found by explorers 
when oxidation had removed the last proof of their celestial 
origin. That there are still lumps of iron left in Arizona is 
merely due to the extreme dryness of the climate and the 
comparatively short time that the iron has been on our planet. 
We are here witnesses to the course of an event which may 
have happened in geologic times anywhere on the earth's 
surface." 

In this desert plateau of dull red sandstone worn by 
the erosion and the storms of untold ages, does there 
indeed lie a submerged star ? And if there does, buried 
so deep in the earth as to elude as yet all the research 
of science, what force projected it, "shot madly from its 
sphere," into the desert lands of Arizona ? To visit these 
extraordinary things — the Petrified Forests, the Meteorite 
Mountain, the Grand Canon — is to feel, in the words 
of the poet, — 

* ' These are but seeds of days, 
Not yet a steadfast morn, 
An intermittent blaze, 
An embryo god unborn. 

I snuff the breath of my morning afar, 
I see the pale lustres condense to a star : 
The fading colors fix, 
The vanishing are seen, 
And the world that shall be 
Twins the world that has been. " 



METEORITE MOUNTAIN 297 

Not the least among the phenomena of Arizona is that 
Emerson, who never saw the Great West, should have 
left on record in his poems the lines and stanzas that 
seem as if written from personal familiarity with its 
unspeakable marvels of scenic and scientific interest. 



298 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 



CHAPTER X 

LOS ANGELES, THE SPELL-BINDER 

** This is the land the sunset washes. 

These are the banks of the Yellow Sea ; 
Where it rose, or whither it rushes, 
These are the western mystery ! 

" Night after night her purple traffic 
Strews the landing with opal bales; 
Merchantmen poise upon horizons, 
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails." 

Emily Dickinson 

" In what ethereal dances ! 
By what eternal streams / " 

Los Angeles, " the City of the Angels," is invested with 
the same poetic suggestion in its name as that which sur- 
rounds Santa Fe,— "the City of the Holy Faith." A 
terraced street is known as " Angel Flight." Any retro- 
spective contemplation of Los Angeles gives one the sensa- 
tion of having been whirled through the starry immensities 
of space. During even a brief stay one afterward discovers 
by the unerring logic of mathematics that within a few 
days he has perhaps travelled some four hundred miles by 
the electric trolley cars, besides his motor-car journeys 
when shot through space from old San Gabriel to the 



LOS ANGELES, SPELL-BINDER 299 

Pacific Coast, or from Elysium Park to Hollywood, and 
far and away on the opposite side of the city. Were one 
caught up in an aero-car, journeying far above the clouds 
for ten days, it could hardly seem more unreal. One can 
only think of Los Angeles as the City of Vast Spaces. 
The town has laid out all the surrounding country, one 
would fancy, in beautiful tracts (there are over four 
thousand), each tract containing several acres, — laid 
out under alluring names, with streets, sidewalks, and 
lamp-posts, all ready for the buyer and the builder. 
The " boom " is something tremendous. Companies 
and corporations run free electric cars to points forty 
miles out of town, as Redotido Beach and other locali- 
ties, for people to inspect the lots offered, — lots at 
prices from "four dollars down, and four dollar a 
month,'" with the entire cost from ninety dollars up 
to that of several hundred. If all the world is not 
supplied with homes it is not the fault of enterprising 
Los Angeles. The incomparable electric trolley system 
renders the entire region within fifty miles around 
eligible for city privileges. People think nothing of 
going thirty, forty, even seventy-five miles by the 
" express electrics." Over an area of a thousand miles 
in length and perhaps one hundred and fifty in width 
there is scattered a population less than that centred 
within city limits in Chicago. The world is wide — in 
Southern California. There is nothing of the dreamy, 



300 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

languorous old Spanish atmosphere in Los Angeles. It is 
the most electrically up-to-date city imaginable. The city 
limits comprise over twenty-eight thousand acres. The 
streets are paved and oiled ; the lighting is wonderful, 
most of it being done from tall towers rather than ordinary 
lamp-posts. Not even New York has any street or avenue 
so illuminated by night as is Broadway in Los Angeles, 
where, as in the boulevards in Paris, one can easily read 
by the street lights. Los Angeles has twenty-one great 
parks and innumerable hills and valleys in the residence re- 
gions. This diversity affords natural facilities for landscape 
gardening which are utilized with fine effect. Spacious 
boulevards, artificial lakes, and series of terraces everywhere 
enchant the eye, seen amidst the bewildering luxuriance of 
creamy magnolia blossoms and the graceful pepper tree. 

The enterprise of Los Angeles is equalled by the refine- 
ment and culture of the people, and the schools, churches, 
libraries — the social life — all reveal the best spirit of 
American institutions. 

That this is one of the spellbinding cities goes with- 
out saying. Everything is in gleam and glitter and 
glow. The electric car and the telephone system are 
here developed to a higher degree than perhaps in any 
other Western city except Denver. The growth of Los 
Angeles is something fairly incredible. A leading park 
commissioner, Dr. Lamb, has described the beauty of the 
four thousand tracts of land (each tract comprising many 



LOS ANGELES, SPELL-BINDER 301 

acres), all laid out, ready for buyers and builders. Of 
the twenty-one parks, one comprises more than three 
thousand acres, and another, Elysium Park, over eight 
hundred acres of hills and valleys already decoratively 
laid out with terraced drives and beautiful shrubs, 
flowers, and artificial lakes. The trend of the city is 
rapidly toward the ocean, some fifteen to twenty miles 
away, and it can hardly be five years before from 
Venice and Santa Monica, on the coast, to Pasadena, 
ten miles to the east of Los Angeles, there will be one 
solid city, one vast metropolis of the Southwest. The 
public library is ably administered, and it is one of con- 
siderable breadth of resou^es, with the advantage of 
having for its librarian Mr. Charles F. Lummis, the 
well-known writer on the Southwest. Madam Severance, 
who in 1878 founded the Woman's Club, a large and 
influential association of which for many years she was 
the president, and Mrs. Rebecca Spring, the friend of 
Margaret Fuller, are two Boston women who have 
transferred their homes to Los Angeles and whose lives 
emphasize Emerson's assertion that it is the fine souls 
who serve us and not what we call fine society. 

The rush and the brilliancy of life in all this Los 
Angeles region transcend description. Broadway has 
more than two miles of fine business blocks, the archi- 
tecture being restricted to some eight or nine stories. 
The beautiful parks, with their artificial lakes, their 



302 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

date-palm trees, their profusion of brilliant flowers, 
attract the eye. There are residence sections of exceeding 
beauty, — the lawns bordered by hedges of rosebushes 
in full bloom and perhaps another rose hedge separating 
the sidewalk from the street. 

From the high plateaus of Northern Arizona to the 
blossoming plains of California is a contrast indeed. In 
Arizona these thousands of acres need only irrigation to 
become richly productive. The climate is delightful, for 
the elevation — over seven thousand feet — insures cool- 
ness and exhilaration almost every day through the 
summer. But at present there seems no conceivable way 
to procure water with which to irrigate. In California 
precisely the same land is irrigated and has also the ad- 
vantage of a rainy season, and the vegetation and fruits 
abound luxuriously. Orange groves, with the golden 
fruit shimmering on the trees ; lemon groves, olive orchards, 
and the avenues and groves of the eucalyptus tree make 
fair the landscape. An important industry here is that 
of lima beans. Tracts of fifteen hundred acres sown with 
these are not unusual, and the crops are contracted for by 
Russia and Germany almost as soon as sown. On one 
of these it is said that the owner had made more than 
a million dollars within two years. The creation of the 
city in imagination is in great favor. Vast tracts of coun- 
try from one to ten miles outside the city limits are 
staked out, as before noted ; avenues and streets defined 



LOS ANGELES, SPELL-BINDER 303 

and named, lamp-posts erected, an attractive name given 
the locality, and lots are offered for sale from perhaps four 
or five hundred dollars up, on the terms of "fifty dollars 
down and ten dollars a month." 

The trolley-car service in and around Los Angeles 
is said to be the best in the world. To Venice and Santa 
Monica, on the beach, — at a distance of some seventeen 
miles, — there are electric "flyers" that make the trip 
within thirty minutes. Venice is a French Etretat. The 
little rows of streets at right angles with the coast line, 
running down to the water, are named " Rose Avenue," 
" Ozone Avenue,"" " Sunset Street,"" and other alluring 
names. This Venice is a veritable (refined and artistic) 
"Midway,"''' with its colonnades of shops offering every 
conceivable phase of trinkets and bijouterie ; its concert 
halls, casino, gay little restaurants, and every conceivable 
variety of amusement. It is the most unique little toy 
town of a creation conceivable, and the electrical display 
and decorations at night are fascinating in their scenic 
effect. 

Santa Monica, some two miles farther up the coast, is 
still, stately, and poetic. Here the blue Pacific rolls in in 
the most bewildering sea greens and deep blues, and over 
it bends a sky rivalling that of Arizona in depth and 
richness of color. The entire Pacific Coast is an idyl of 
landscape loveliness. 

But of life. What are the people of this lovely young 



304 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

city of two hundred thousand inhabitants doing and 
thinking? It is not a question to be answered in a 
paragraph. Life here is intense, interesting, full of color 
and movement, and its many-faceted aspects invite con- 
sideration. As one sits, for instance, on a Pasadena 
piazza, with the golden glory of the sunset seen over the 
Sierra Madre, and the rose hedges, the orange groves, the 
great bushes of heliotrope that are almost like young trees 
pouring out their mingled fragrance on the evening air, 
one falls under its spell. As the twilight deepens into 
darkness the great searchlight from Mount Lowe, directly 
in the foreground, a picturesque panorama, may swing out 
with its weird, sweeping, dazzling illumination over the 
scene. When this searchlight is out, people at the far- 
away beaches can see to read by it at distances of from 
twenty-five to fifty miles. Quite near Mount Lowe — one 
of the adjacent peaks — is Mount Wilson, on which the 
new Carnegie Observatory is to be located. This will be 
fitted with the largest telescope in the world and will have 
the advantage of every latest scientific appliance. 

Pasadena, like all the California towns and cities, 
covers very large tracts of country. There is a thriving 
business centre, not very far from which are the great 
Raymond Hotel and other winter resorts for the throngs 
of tourists who are almost as important to the revenues of 
California as they are to Italy. There are both North 
and South Pasadena, — each almost a separate city in 



LOS ANGELES, SPELL-BINDER 305 

itself, — and the most beautiful street is Orange Grove 
Avenue, with large estates on either side and spacious 
lawns. On Fair Oaks Avenue, in a pretty cottage, lives 
Prof. George Wharton James, the famous explorer, scien- 
tist, and notable writer on the Grand Canon in Arizona, — 
and the greatest interpreter, indeed, of the entire South- 
west. The books of Professor James, " In and Out of 
the Old Missions of California," "The Indians of the 
Painted Desert," and " Indian Basketry " (besides his book 
on the " Grand Canyon, 1 ' which is the accepted authority), 
interpret the many phases of life in the Southwest in a 
vivid and accurate manner, rendering them invaluable 
to contemporary literature. Professor James makes his 
original explorations, taking with him an assistant and 
his own camera, and going through varied hardships, 
almost greater than could be realized. In the vast 
desert spaces, remote from any human habitation, he 
has had to swim large, muddy, inland lakes, where 
vermin were swarming ; to go without food and water, 
and to endure the intense fatigue of long tramps. In 
perusing his books the reader little dreams at what 
fearful cost of energy all this original material was 
obtained. In his home Professor James has a most 
interesting collection of the objets (Fart of the Southwest. 
One must travel over this part of the country in order 
to appreciate them. They are as distinctive of New 
Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California as the old 

20 



306 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

masters and other phases of Italian art are of Italy. 
There are brilliant Navajo blankets and rugs — soft, 
rich, and vivid in color, with curiously decorated de- 
signs ; the most interesting array of Indian pottery — 
the many specimens from the old tombs being far finer 
than any pottery done by the modern Indians ; and at 
the entrance to his lawn Professor James has a huge 
meteorite from Meteorite Mountain in Arizona, which 
weighs over a ton. He has a large section of a tree of 
the Petrified Forest, and the finer specimens that show the 
bark and the fibre, and also the crystallization. His 
library is large and fine, and comprises many autograph 
gift copies from other authors. 

One feature of the life of Professor James is espe- 
cially helpful. In his spacious library upstairs, on every 
Thursday evening, he gives an informal talk on his travels 
and explorations to his friends and neighbors. His 
personal experiences in studying the phenomenon of the 
Salton Sea and the vagaries of the Colorado River, which 
is a law unto itself, are most interesting. 

The call of the wild is not more irresistible than the 
call of the desert to Professor James. He has lived on 
it and with it, and learned to read its hieroglyphics. 
The desert spirits have companioned him. He has ex- 
plored vast spaces of the Grand Canon ; he has encamped, 
day after day, even week after week, on the Painted Desert ; 
he has wandered in the grim strange Ton to Basin, and 



LOS ANGELES, SPELL-BINDER 307 

sailed (of late) the Salton Sea, — this sheet of four hun- 
dred square miles of water, this impromptu lake where 
but a little while before was a deserted hollow of a long 
extinct volcanic sea. Nature leads man a pretty dance 
out in this Land of Enchantment. No one would ven- 
ture to prophesy at night just what stage transformation 
might take place before morning. This very uncertainty 
of any particular tenure of mountain, sea, or desert per- 
haps tends, unconsciously, to so react upon the popula- 
tion that their more real life is thrown forward into the 
future. For instance, Los Angeles lays no particular stress 
upon her present population, but announces that by 1910 
the figures will undoubted^' reach the half-million mark. 
Nor, indeed, can the observer doubt this in any contem- 
plation of the present incredible rapidity of progress in 
every direction. The city seems half made up of million- 
naires, and the latest municipal bank clearings amounted 
to almost four hundred millions of dollars. Los Angeles 
is really an exotic, for the latest census reveals the aston- 
ishing fact that ninety per cent of its inhabitants are from 
the East, leaving only ten per cent as native Californians. 
Never was the advertising of a city carried out to the 
degree of being fairly a fine art so wonderfully as in Los 
Angeles. In the Chamber of Commerce there is a per- 
petual exhibition of fruits and flowers in season, and of 
the products and manufactures of the country. 

Los Angeles, like most of the other more important 



308 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Western cities, is deeply concerned with irrigation schemes. 
This region of California supplements its rainfall with irri- 
gation, and between the two the whole country is in bloom 
and blossom. Los Angeles is now arranging a gigantic 
scheme to bring water from the Owen's River, two hundred 
miles away, by means of tunnels through mountains and a 
huge canal. This fall of water will not only entirely 
supply the city with water power of immense force and 
volume, but it is estimated that it will also irrigate a 
hundred thousand acres. The scheme will employ five 
thousand men for some four years, and it is estimated that 
the cost will be twenty-five millions. No undertaking 
daunts the Western city. If an enterprise is desirable, it 
is to be achieved. That is the law and the prophets in 
the Land of Enchantment. 

Los Angeles, like Colorado Springs, is the paradise of 
excursions. The trip up Mount Lowe to the observatory 
offers a magnificent panorama of landscape, including Pasa- 
dena Valley and Catalina and Santa Barbara islands. Old 
San Gabriel Mission and the San Gabriel Valley are infi- 
nitely interesting, and the famous bells of San Gabriel still 
ring in their quaint, rude stone framework even though they 
are jangled and out of tune with the lapse of years. The 
Sierra Nevada Mountains rise from the San Gabriel Valley. 

One of the excursions has a feature that is new to every 
visitor, — that of glass-bottom power boats which give a 
view of the marvels of the ocean. These boats run from 






LOS ANGELES, SPELL-BINDER 309 

Avalon on the coast — an hour's express trolley ride from 
Los Angeles — to the submarine gardens adjoining Cata- 
lina Island, and they have a capacity to seat over a hun- 
dred passengers around the glass. In sailing over these 
submarine gardens the boats move very slowly, that the 
passengers may enjoy the view of the strange seaweed, the 
marine flowers, the varied aquatic vegetation. Catalina 
Island is a favorite sea resort, lying in such convenient 
proximity to the city. 

Los Angeles seems to be the paradise of every one 
who has a new idea — or ideal — for the betterment 
of humanity. There is an atmosphere of idealism. 
Among the recent institutions is the Pacific School of 
Osteopathy, with a faculty of thirty physicians, men 
and women, who base their therapeutics on the scientific 
fact that the body is subject to chemical, electrical, 
thermal, mental, and mechanical treatment. In the line 
of ethics Rev. B. Fay Mills has established a compre- 
hensive movement of " Fellowship," including religious 
services and social intercourse, with a large and enthu- 
siastic membership drawn by this eloquent orator and 
preacher who for many years before in his pastorate in 
Boston preached to large congregations who gave him 
profound appreciation. 

A most important centre that radiates sweetness and 
light in infinite measure is that of Christ Church (Epis- 
copal), whose rector, Rev. Baker P. Lee, is not only 



310 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

eminent as a preacher, but as a leader and inspirer of 
a network of organizations connected with the church 
for the betterment of human life. Christ Church parish 
is a large one, numbering over two thousand in direct 
connection with the church, with a list of communicants 
of over twelve hundred. Within the past three years 
the parish has built a magnificent new church and a 
rectory, and the holy earnestness of the young and gifted 
rector makes the work one of vital spirituality. 

No city can offer more beautiful homes than those 
of Los Angeles ; more attractive parks, more enchanting 
scenery, or more delightful excursions over a network of 
electric lines which aggregate above five hundred miles 
of single track and reach one hundred towns and villages 
from Monrovia of the foothills to Redondo by the sea. 
The world has but one Southern California, with its cool, 
soft, gray sea-fogs in the early mornings, followed by 
its cloudless days of blue sky over golden sunshine ; where 
the sea-breeze gladly brings its health-giving ozone in 
exchange for the odors of orange blossoms and roses; 
where the mountains stand glorying in the ruggedness 
of their rocky cliffs until, touched by sunset's wand, they 
glow with pink lights and purple shadows ; and over all 
comes a golden radiance that changes the forbidding 
outlines of their jagged peaks into radiant beauty, — 
fitting features of the vast panorama of nature to hold 
their eternal place in the Land of Enchantment. 



GRAND CANON 311 






CHAPTER XI 

GRAND CANON; THE CARNIVAL OF THE GODS 

" What time the gods kept carnival ! " 

Emerson 

" The earth grew bold with longing 

And called the high gods down ; 
Yea, though ye dwell in heaven and hell, 

I challenge their renown. 
Abodes as fair I build ye 

As heaven's rich courts of pearl. 
And chasms dire where flood like fire 

Ravage and roar and whirl. 

" Come, for my soul is weary 

Of time and death and change ; 
Eternity doth summon me — 

With mightier worlds I range. 
Come, for my vision's glory 

Awaits your songs and wings ; 
Here on my breast I bid ye rest 
From starry wanderings." 

Harriet Monroe 

One takes the wings of the morning and arrives at the 
uttermost parts of the earth to find — the Grand Canon, 
the scenic marvel of the entire world. 

Only to the poet's vision is the Grand Canon revealed ; 
only to the poet's touch do its mighty harmonies respond. 






312 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

For this sublime spectacle is as vital as a drama enacted 
on the stage, only its acts require the centuries and the 
ages in which to represent themselves. Whatever one sees 
of the Grand Canon, — it matters not from what com- 
manding view of vision or vista, one sees only an infinitesi- 
mal point. It is the Carnival of the Gods. " Prophets 
and poets had wandered here," writes Harriet Monroe, 
" before they were born to tell their mighty tales, — Isaiah 
and iEschylus and Dante, the giants who dared the 
utmost. Here at last the souls of great architects must 
find their dreams fulfilled; must recognize the primal 
inspiration which, after long ages, had achieved Assyrian 
palaces, the temples and pyramids of Egypt, the fortresses 
and towered cathedrals of mediaeval Europe. For the 
inscrutable Prince of builders had reared these imperish- 
able monuments, evenly terraced upward from the remote 
abyss ; had so cunningly planned them that mortal foot 
could never climb and enter to disturb the everlasting 
hush. Of all richest elements they were fashioned, — 
jasper and chalcedony, topaz, beryl, and amethyst, fire- 
hearted opal, and pearl ; for they caught and held the 
most delicate colors of a dream and flashed full recognition 
to the sun. Never on earth could such glory be unveiled, 
— not on level spaces of sea, not on the cold bare peaks 
of mountains. This was not earth ; for was not heaven 
itself across there, rising above yonder alabaster marge in 
opalescent ranks for the principalities and powers? . . . 



GRAND CANON 313 

In a moment we stood at the end of the world, at the 
brink of the kingdoms of peace and pain. The gorgeous 
purples of sunset fell into darkness and rose into light over 
mansions colossal beyond the needs of our puny unwinged 
race. Terrific abysses yawned and darkened ; magical 
heights glowed with iridescent fire.'' 

If one pauses for a moment with any sense of obligation 
to himself to gain some rationale of this canon ; if for a 
moment he turn from rhapsody and ecstasy and the dream 
of poet and painter to grope after statistical estimates, 
what does he find ? One comparison is that, — 

"If the Eiffel Tower, which with a height of almost a 
thousand feet is the tallest structure in the world, were placed 
at the bottom of the canon in its deepest part, five more 
towers just like the first would have to be piled on top of one 
another to reach the rim of the plateau." 

And again : 

" Could the canon be filled in for a building site, it would 
furnish room enough for fifty New York cities. Indeed, it 
would have an area of sixteen thousand square miles, equal 
to the whole of Switzerland, or the states of Massachusetts, 
Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined." 

Statistical comparisons are, at best, a necessary evil 
which, once confronted, need not companion one further. 
It is beauty, it is sublimity, not mathematical assurances, 
that really lays hold on life. The inexplicable impressions 



314 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

made by this spectacle are mirrored in the following 
words : — 

<( As I grew familiar with the vision I could not quite ex- 
plain its stupendous quality. From mountain tops one looks 
across greater distances and sees range after range lifting 
snowy peaks into the blue. The ocean reaches out into 
boundless space, and the ebb and flow of its waters have the 
beauty of rhythmic motion and exquisitely varied color. 
And in the rush of mighty cataracts are power and splendor 
and majestic peace. Yet for grandeur appalling and un- 
earthly ; for ineffable, impossible beauty, the canon tran- 
scends all these. It is as though to the glory of nature 
were added the glory of art ; as though, to achieve her ut- 
most, the proud young world had commanded architecture 
to build for her and color to grace the building. The irreg- 
ular masses of mountains, cast up out of the molten earth in 
some primeval war of elements, bear no relation to these 
prodigious symmetrical edifices mounted on abysmal terraces 
and grouped into spacious harmonies which give form to 
one's dreams of heaven. The sweetness of green does not 
last forever, but these mightily varied purples are eternal. 
All that grows and moves must perish, while these silent 
immensities endure." 

The majestic panorama dominates every detail of daily 
life. As when in Bayreuth for the Wagner music-dramas 
alone, every other consideration is subordinated to these, 
so in life in El Tovar, on Bright Angel Trail, one's hours 



GRAND CANON 315 

for sleep and for any daily occupations are held strictly 
amenable to " effects " in the mysterious splendor of the 
Titanic underworld. To see the canon under the full 
moon ; to see it when all the pinnacles of rock are leaping 
in rose-red flame under a sunrise ; to see it in a dream of 
twilight as the purple canopy falls, — all these hours, — 
all hours are made for the magical transformations. With 
every breath of change of the atmosphere this celestial 
beauty changes. One is hardly conscious as to the special 
ways and means by which he finds himself in an enchanted 
world, — 

" From the shore of souls arrived ? " 

It is very possible. Nor does he know how — or when 
■ — he shall depart. The past is effaced, and the future re- 
cedes into some unformulated atmosphere. Life, a thou- 
sand lifetimes, concentrate themselves in the present. A 
supreme experience has always this peculiarity, — that it 
bars out all the past and all the future. When one is on 
the Mount of Transfiguration, he is not scrutinizing the 
pathway by which he came nor that by which he may 
descend. 

Even if one has seen the Grand Canon before, he is sur- 
prised to find how absolutely newly created it is to him 
when its haunting magic draws him back. No enshrined 
memory can compare with the reality. In seeing the 
Petrified Forest one checks it off as a thing accomplished 



316 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

for life. It is definite. The great logs of agate and jasper 
and chalcedony lie on the ground as they have lain for 
perhaps thousands of ages. It is a wonder — the seventh 
wonder of the world, if one pleases — and the paradise of 
geologists, but it is unchanging. Not so the Grand 
Canon. The canon is a perpetual transformation scene. 
Its color effects rival those of an electric fountain 
under the full play of the spectroscope. It is rose, 
purple, amber, emerald, pearl gray, pale blue, scarlet — 
according to atmospheric states. One leaves it in the 
late afternoon with the rocky towers and pinnacles and 
battlements all in glowing scarlet, seen through a trans- 
parent air. He steps out upon the broad hotel 
piazzas an hour later and, behold, the uncalculated spaces 
of the canon are filled with a half-transparent blue mist 
which envelops all the curious sandstone formations that 
gleam in pal rose and opal tints through this thin blue 
mist, and assume wraith-like shapes. Major Powell well 
said, that really to see the Grand Canon, a year is necessary. 
Yet just as truly may it be said that even for two days it 
is worth crossing the continent to enjoy this most marvel- 
lous of spectacles. Only the scientist and the specialist 
dream of seeing it in anything like completeness. For 
the tourist and traveller a range of twenty miles is quite 
sufficient to disclose its representative beauty. A day's 
drive by the stage to Grandview Point, Hance's Trail, and 
Moran's Point is easily made between nine and five o'clock. 



GRAND CANON 317 

A drive of two or three miles in the opposite direction 
will include Rowe's and O'Neil's points. One day will 
allow the adventurous tourist to " go down the trail." Still, 
after doing all these things, the best of all, it may be, is 
to live into the atmosphere. To draw one's chair out on 
the broad balcony of the new and beautiful hotel, El 
Tovar, and sit and dream and gaze and wonder, and 
wonder and gaze and dream, is, perhaps, the greatest joy 
one can have in all the time passed here, especially if 
the solitude can be the solitude a deux. No joy, no in- 
terest, is of much consequence until or unless it is sym- 
pathetically shared. As a decor de scene the Grand Canon 
is unrivalled. The magic and mystery of all the universe 
broods over its Titanic spaces. 

The air is the most bracing, exhilarating, and exquisite 
imaginable. The great rolling mesas covered with pine 
forests are more than seven thousand feet above the sea, 
and their exhilarating and tonic properties are beyond 
description. The entire atmosphere is fragrant with 
the pines. Throat and chest are bathed in balm and 
healing. There can hardly be any difficulty with the 
bronchial and breathing mechanism that cannot find its 
cure here. And the charm, the utter enchantment of 
living on this rainbow-tinted canon, a mile and a half 
deep, thirteen miles across at this " Bright Angel M point 
(and this is its narrowest place), the joy of life is to steep 
one's self in the atmosphere of enchanting loveliness ; 



318 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

and this perpetual play of color is an experience that 
finds no interpretation in language. 

On first alighting from the branch of the Sante Fe that 
runs from Williams, Arizona, to Bright Angel, at the head 
of Bright Angel Trail on the Grand Canon, — a three 
hour's ride of transcendent beauty among the purple peaks 
of the San Francisco mountains, — on first stepping from 
the train up the terrace to the beautiful "El Tovar" 
built on the very rim of the canon, one objects strenu- 
ously to entering the hotel. His eye has caught the 
Vision, — a "celestial Inferno bathed in soft fires?" or 
the " Promised Land ? " or the mystical vision that John 
saw on the Island of Patmos ? The hotel would, presum- 
ably, remain ; but this spectacle, — what can it be save a 
mirage, one never seen before on earth and perhaps not 
to be too confidently anticipated in Paradise? Would 
such a picture remain? Can one safely leave a sunset 
which is all a miracle of splendor while he goes in to 
dine? Can he safely turn away from the heavens when 
a young moon at night is winging her way down the sky 
and expect to find her midway in the heavens? And 
could one safely leave this most marvellous scene of all 
while he should bestow himself in his rooms? 

*' Would the Vision there remain ? 
Would the Vision come again ? " 

Could it be, in the very nature of things, any more per- 
manent than any other momentary revelation of an en- 




ZIGZAG, BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, GRAND CANON, ARIZONA 



GRAND CANON 319 

chanted hour that would fade into the darkness as night 
came on, like the splendor of a sunset, the color-scheme 
of a rainbow, or the glory and the freshness of a dream ? 

Instead, the Grand Canon prefigures itself to one as an 
apparition, and while he may gaze upon it under all 
changing lights of dawn, of noonday, of sunset — and of 
moonlight — he cannot come to any realization that it is 
there all the time. His room in the hotel may look out 
into it and over it ; and, waking in the night, he rises and 
leans out of his window to see if it is still there. One 
does not expect a vision of the New Jerusalem, a palpi- 
tating, changing, flaming, throbbing sea of color — in its 
rose-reds, its greens, its amber, gold, and purple — to re- 
main like a field or a forest. It seems a thing of condi- 
tions, visible at one moment, vanished, perchance, the 
next. 

Think of a chasm a mile and a half deep, from thirteen 
to eighteen miles wide, and as long as from Boston to 
New York — two hundred miles ! Think of it again as 
not merely a deep, dark chasm, but as filled with the 
most wonderful architectural effects in the sandstone for- 
mations which simulate Chinese pagodas, temples, altars, 
cathedrals, domes, and towers so perfectly that one is 
incredulous of the fact that their shaping is nature's 
work alone. Add to this the color scheme, now an in- 
tense royal purple, again flashes of rose and green and 
ivory and a rare blue ; or again a " nocturne " in silvery 



320 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

gray, with hints of lingering rose and amber shimmering 
in the air. Until within a few years the Grand Canon 
was so inaccessible as to quite account for the general 
ignorance of this most wonderful scenic phenomenon in 
our country, and, indeed, with no exaggeration be it said, 
the most wonderful in the entire world. Twenty Yosem- 
ites might be thrown into it and make no impression ; 
and as for Niagara, it would be a mere tiny waterfall in 
comparison. 

In the trail leading downward into the canon the first 
level is just five times the height of St. Peter's in Rome, 
or the Pyramids of Cheops. 

From the brink one looks down a mile and a half into 
towers and pinnacles; one looks across eighteen miles 
in the widest place ; and one looks up and down its 
tortuous length, as its complicated system of canons re- 
vealed themselves as far as the eye could see either way. 
One gazes, not into a deep, dark cleft, a Titanic royal 
gorge, but on and into a sea of color and a wealth of 
architectural wonders, — cathedrals, towers, mosques, pin- 
nacles, minarets, temples, and balconies exceeding in vari- 
ety of design, in extraordinary beauty of grouping and 
splendor of color, anything of which one could dream, 
even in his most enchanted moments. The red sandstone, 
the brilliant white of the limestone luminous under the 
setting sun, the green of pine trees or of copper rocks, the 
gray and ochre tints of gravel and fallen rocks and debris, 







A CLIFF ON BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, GUAM) CANON" 



GRAND CANON 321 

the soft, deep purple mist enveloping all as an atmosphere 
in which all these architectural marvels seemed to swim — 
the strange, unearthly splendor of it all — holds one under 
a fascination that can neither be analyzed nor described. 
This, then, is " El Grande Canon de la Colorado." One 
stands speechless, breathless, as if transported to some 
other planet. Suddenly all life — everything that floated 
in memory — seemed confused, unreal. Was the past 
(whose running series of incident and event and circum- 
stance already seemed vague) a dream, and was this the 
reality ? Or had there never been any reality in life be- 
fore ? Was this a dream, wrought under some untold 
spell of enchantment ? Would one hear the water nixies 
chanting their refrain if he listened ? Or was this scene of 
Titanic grandeur the abode of Wagner's gods and heroes ? 
One watched for the sacred fires to flame on Brunhilde's 
rock and for Siegfried to appear. One saw the ship 
which had borne Tristan on his ill-starred voyage, and 
the garden where the lovers confessed their intense and 
instant love, and the fatal potion scene rises before him ; 
and again he is lost in rapt ecstasy as the air seems filled 
with the passionate drama of Lilli Lehmann and Alvarez. 
For let Ternina and other younger women come and go 
in the Wagner music-drama, and yet where will that abso- 
lute perfection of dramatic action, that passionate exalta- 
tion of emotion, ever again attend and invest any singer 
as they invest and are identified with Lilli Lehmann ? 

21 



322 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

" The Fairest enchants me, 
The Mighty commands me. " 

In this most sublime of all earthly spectacles there are 
aerial landscape effects as delicate and evanescent as a 
cloud-wreath, or as a fog that advances, wraith-like, to 
melt away into dissolving views. " The region is full of 
wonders and beauties and sublimities that Shelley's im- 
aginings do not match in the ' Prometheous Unbound,' " 
w r rote Charles Dudley Warner. 

If the world realized the marvellous effects of this very 
Carnival of the Gods, the infinite spaces of the Grand 
Canon itself could not contain all who would eagerly 
throng to behold it. The statistical record of the increase 
of visitors is rather interesting. In 1900 there were eight 
hundred and thirteen ; the succeeding year, six thousand 
eight hundred and eighty-three ; while in 1903 the number 
increased to nearly one hundred and twenty-eight thou- 
sand. Since that date the number of visitors has multi- 
plied itself after the fashion of compound interest. The 
establishment of all the conveniences and comforts, not 
to say luxuries, of modern travel may be one of the 
most potent factors in this increase of visitors. Until 
within five years the Grand Canon could only be reached 
by a stage ride of seventy miles through the Coconino 
Forest, — whose dim gray twilight reminds one of the 
forests of Fontainebleau, — and which drive, however ro- 
mantically beautiful, was attended with too great terrestial 



GRAND CANON 323 

discomfort to commend it to general public service. Until 
1906 the hotel accommodations, also, while offering a 
modest comfort, were essentially primitive ; while now the 
superb new Harvey hostelry, " El Tovar,'" built at a cost 
of a quarter of a million dollars (and the Harvey name is 
a synonym in the West for everything admirable in dining 
cars, refreshment stands, and hotels), insures to every 
traveller any degree of luxurious comfort he requires. 
Even the man who, after visiting all the enchanted points 
in the Land of Enchantment, in its prehistoric period of 
twenty years ago before Pullman cars climbed the moun- 
tain peaks and the Waldorf-Astoria type of hotels sprang 
up, the man who, after a trip through these wonders of 
the world, returned to New York and declared that he 
would rather see an electric bell and a bath than all the 
grandeur between Pike's Peak and the Pacific, would now 
be fully reconciled to Western sojourns. He would find 
his electric bell and his bath to be as much a matter of 
course as in Fifth Avenue, besides also finding that there 
were spectacles, — as that of the Garden of the Gods, 
Cheyenne Canon, the Petrified Forests, the Grand Canon, 
and the Los Angeles electric trolley system (which quite 
deserves to rank with the modern " Seven Wonders " of the 
world), and which Fifth Avenue by no means provided for 
her votaries. In fact, " El Tovar " is so inclusive of com- 
fort as to be fairly a feature of the canon, commanding, on 
one side, a magnificence of prospect without parallel in the 



324 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

world in the mighty chasm on whose brink it stands, on the 
other side the fragrant Coconino pine forest, — the largest 
belt of pine timber in the United States, and which has 
been made a government forest reservation. 

There is now a project to erect a memorial to Major 
John W. Powell, the pioneer explorer of the Grand 
Canon, to be placed on the rim at the head of Bright 
Angel Trail at El Tovar. This most fitting plan to 
honor the name of the great scientist and explorer whose 
research contributed the first authoritative knowledge 
of the canon is the thought of the American Scenic 
Association, which will petition Congress to grant the 
requisite appropriation. No monument to human great- 
ness could be more ideally placed than this to perpetually 
repeat to every visitor and sojourner the name of the 
explorer who successfully achieved the most startling and 
heroic journey in all history, — that made through the 
complete extent of the Grand Canon. 

It was in 1869 that Major Powell, with four boats 
and nine men, inaugurated this expedition, starting from 
Green River City in Utah. He was dissuaded and im- 
portuned in the most urgent way by those most familiar 
with the region not to attempt the feat. The Indians 
especially insisted that no boat could live in any one 
of the score of rapids to be passed. There was also a 
tradition that for some hundreds of miles the river lost 
itself in the earth, and Major Powell and his men would 



GRAND CANON 325 

thus be imprisoned within a Titantic fortress from which 
escape would be impossible. But men of destiny do not 
hesitate when they are led to great achievements. Major 
Powell set out on May 24, 1869, with his nine men and 
four boats, and landed on August 3, with four men 
and two boats, at the mouth of the Virgin River, after 
having sailed the boiling torrent of the Colorado River, 
at the bottom of the canon, for more than a thousand 
miles. Mr. C. A. Higgins characterizes this feat as " the 
most wonderful geological and spectacular phenomenon 
known to mankind." 

The first authentic knowledge of the existence of the 
Grand Canon dates back to August of 1540, when the 
Spanish friar, Alvar Nunez, after years of romantic wan- 
derings among the pueblos of the Southwest, returned 
to Mexico with tales of this mighty chasm. Coronado, 
who had discovered the Seven Cities of Cibola (of which 
now only Zuni remains), ordered Garcia Lopez to take a 
band of men and Indian guides and search for this chasm, 
which he succeeded in discovering ; with the more difficulty, 
surely, in that one has to gain its very rim before he has 
hardly an intimation of its proximity. The spectacle of 
the canon always presents itself as a sudden surprise. It 
was not, however, until 1884 that, by the building of the 
great transcontinental line, the Santa Fe, the Grand 
Canon became accessible. Then for some twenty years it 
was reached, as has already been noted, by stage from 



326 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Flagstaff. Now one can travel in his sleeper without 
change from Chicago to El Tovar, and thousands of 
tourists annually visit the extraordinary scene. Not the 
least of the interesting data regarding the canon is this 
gulf of more than three hundred years that divides its dis- 
covery from its taking rank as the most phenomenal scenic 
resort of the world. The mills of the gods grind slowly. 
The visitors to the Grand Canon present singularly cosmo- 
politan groups, there being hardly a country in the world 
that is not represented at some time during the year. 

For the canon has all seasons for its own. It is almost 
as much of an object of winter as of summer pilgrimage. 
One season is found, on the whole, to be almost as en- 
joyable here as another. It is cool in summer, and it is 
warm and sunny in winter. Sometimes there is a fairy 
snowfall, but hardly more lasting than a spring frost, 
and when it comes it only adds another flitting variety 
to the stupendous scene. 

With untold tons of the water of the Colorado River 
pouring itself in torrents through the bottom of the 
canon, all the water used for the table, for toilet, and 
for laundry purposes has to be brought from a distance 
of a hundred and twenty miles, and twenty thousand 
gallons are in daily use. An electric-light plant furnishes 
brilliant illumination. 

The Hopi House, built in imitation of an Indian 
pueblo, with a group of quaintly garbed Hopi Indians 



GRAND CANON 327 

within in attendance, is a curiosity ; and besides the 
Hopis there are Navajos and Supais coming to sell their 
handiwork, — that of pottery, silver ornaments, blankets, 
and baskets. Cataract Canon, forty miles from El Tovar, 
is the home of the Supais, and it is a place that well 
repays visiting for an entirely new point of view of the 
vast canon that it affords. There are peaceful Indians 
to be seen daily riding their horses through the pine 
woods, journeying from El Tovar to Grand View, to 
" Hance's Trail," to " Moran's Point," and other localities, 
to sell or barter their wares. One old Indian who seems 
to roam about alone has developed an ingenious manner of 
procuring food when he is hungry. He enters the hotel 
office and seeks the proprietor himself, recognizing with un- 
erring instinct that this gentleman's liberal endowment of 
sympathy and unfailing generosity never permits him to 
" turn down " a request for aid. The wily old savage seeks 
him out and makes conspicuous overtures of his affection. 

" You is heap my son ; pale face heap my son ! " the 
dusky visitor declares, and when this assurance is empha- 
sized to the proprietor he realizes that it means he is 
" heap my son " because his visitor is hungry. These out- 
bursts of devotion occur only when the old Indian is at 
his wits'* end to know where to procure something to eat. 
Once fed he is off, and thinks no more of the man whom 
he assured that he was " heap my son " until hunger again 
assails him and stimulates his parental affection. 



328 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

So the little trifles and pleasantries of the comedie 
humaine assert their place in the general life even on the 
rim of the sublime spectacle of the Carnival of the Gods. 

For more than two hundred miles the canon offers its 
innumerable panoramas, no one ever duplicating that of 
another. There are thousands of canons in it — it is a 
complicated system of colossal canons. Every wall is an 
aggregation of hundreds of walls. Every pinnacle is 
formed of hundreds of pinnacles. When the sun shines 
in splendor on the vermilion walls, the glory is almost 
beyond what man can bear. When from the trail below 
a star seems to float in the air and rest on the verge of 
the cliff, what words can convey any image of this ineffable 
beauty ? 

The cloud-effects are another of the phases of faery. A 
rain creates a panorama of clouds creeping out of one 
canon and flying into another, all " as if they had souls 
and wills of their own,' 1 says Major Powell ; and he adds, 
" In the imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and 
when they are in the canon the skies come down into the 
gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift them up to immeas- 
urable heights, for the sky must still be far away ; thus 
they lend infinity to the walls." The canon mirrors the 
color and the state of the sky as water does. This is one 
of the most curious facts connected with it. " Yet form 
and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the 
Grand Canon,'" continues Major Powell ; " it is the land 



GRAND CANON 329 

of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling 
in floods of music when the storm-gods play upon the 
rocks, and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the 
infinite blue of heaven is unveiled. . . . The adamant 
foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sub- 
lime harp upon which the clouds of heaven play with 
mighty tempests or with gentle showers." 

Major Powell, the explorer and practically the mod- 
ern discoverer of the canon, remains its most complete 
interpreter. His journal narrating that remarkable 
voyage through the Colorado River in a region " more 
difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas," 
is fairly an epic in American literature. He had the 
vision of the painter and the heart of the poet. 
He felt that infinitely complex variety of the canon, 
and he read its sublime inscriptions on a scroll not 
made with hands. He pictures one feature especially 
that has hardly been touched by other writers, — that 
of the perpetually changing aspects. " One moment 
as we looked out over the landscape," he writes, " the 
atmosphere seemed to be trembling and moving about, 
giving the impression of an unstable land: plains and 
hills and clifts and distant mountains seemed vaguely 
to be floating about in a trembling, wave-rocked sea ; 
and patches of landscape would seem to float away and 
be lost, and then reappear. . . . The craggy buttes 
seem dancing about. . . . The sun shone in splendor 



330 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

on the vermilion walls. Shaded into green and gray 

when the rocks were lichened over, the river filled the 

channel from wall to wall, and the canon opened like 

a beautiful doorway to a region of glory. But at 

evening, when the sun was going down and the shadows 

were settling in the canon, the scarlet gleams and roseate 

hues, blended with tints of green and gray, slowly 

changed to sombre brown above and black shadows crept 

over them from below. . . . Lying down, one looked up 

through the canon and saw that only a little of the blue 

heavens appeared overhead, — a crescent of blue sky with 

but two or three constellations peering down upon us. 

Soon I saw a bright star that appeared to rest on the 

verge of the cliffs overhead, and, as it moved up from the 

rock, I almost wondered that it did not fall, and indeed it 

appeared as if swayed down by its own weight. The star 

appeared to be in the canon, so high were the walls. 1 ' 

So the wonderful story of Major Powell's runs on of 

these atmospheric phenomena of the canon, effects that 

"... give to seas and sunset skies 
Their unspent beauty of surprise." 

It is from Bright Angel Trail that the Grand Canon is 
the most accessible. Parties of men and women, mounted 
on sure-footed burros, go down this trail with their 
guides — apparently under the special protection of the 
bright angels of the celestial host, as no accident has ever, 
thus far, occurred. Prof. George Wharton James notes, in 



GRAND CANON 331 

his invaluable work on the Grand Canon, 1 that this trail 
was originally used by the Havasupai Indians and that 
the rude irrigating canals that conveyed water from an ad- 
jacent spring to a so-called Indian Garden in the near vicin- 
ity are still to be seen. The view from the head of Bright 
Angel Trail is one of vast extent and a peculiar sublimity. 
Buddha Temple is a colossal pile that rises in isolated 
grandeur, and near it is Buddha Cloister. An impressive 
tower of rock rising in the canon bears the honored name 
of Agassiz. Isis Temple and the Temple of Brahma are 
within the range of the eye from this point. The per- 
fectly transparent air, and that absence of aerial vibration 
that characterizes the atmosphere of Arizona, conspire to 
invest all distance with magic illusion. Looking across 
the thirteen miles of the canon's abyss from Bright Angel 
Trail, the opposite rim hardly seems farther away than 
the distance of three or four city blocks. Isis Temple is 
said to be as great in mass as the mountainous part of 
Mt. Washington, and the summit of Isis looks down six 
thousand feet into the depths of a chasm, the ledges on 
the side being " as impracticable as the face of Bunker 
Hill Monument.'" 

It is a noticeable fact, and one which the general 
reader may regard with quiet amusement, that all the 
writers who even attempt to allude to the Grand Canon 

i In and Around the Grand Canyon, by George Wharton James. 
Little, Brown, and Co. 1900. 



332 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

quote copiously from each other ; and this is the almost 
inevitable instinct of each, in order to reinforce himself 
with authority for statements which, to those who have 
not themselves gazed upon this Carnival of the Gods, 
would sound incredible even to the verge of the wildest 
extravaganza. Major PowelFs vivid transcription of his 
thrilling journey through the canon, sailing through the 
boiling, rushing river whose torrents constantly threatened 
to engulf his boats, — Major PowelFs transcription stands 
for itself alone ; it was not only the pictured scenes of a 
writer, but the scientific report of an official government 
explorer; but since this, — and from Major PowelFs nar- 
rative every writer invariably quotes, — since this, the 
writers quote from each other ; they use each other's 
statements as evidence which they cite in order to support 
their own statements regarding a marvel so unspeakably 
phenomenal that the most literal and statistical descrip- 
tion reads like an Arabian Nights romance. Then, too, 
the array of pen-pictures is interesting. A writer who 
coined wonderful descriptive phrases is Mr. C. A. Higgins. 
Of the silent transformations of the canon when it " sinks 
into mysterious purple shadow " he said : " The far Shinumo 
Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a leaden 
horizon the long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft bril- 
liance of indescribable beauty, a light that, elsewhere, surely 
never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls," he con- 
tinues, " and should there be a moon, the scene in part 



GRAND CANON 333 

revives in silver light a thousand spectral forms projected 
from inscrutable gloom ; dreams of mountains, as in their 
sleep they brood on things eternal." Others who have 
written of the Grand Cauon are : Harriet Monroe, whose 
poet's pen is dipped in the colors of an artist's palette ; 
George Wharton James ; and Mr. Charles S. Gleed, a dis- 
tinguished lawyer of Topeka, who thus described the 
Canon's wonders : 

" Surrendering our minds to the magic spell of that mighty 
chasm, what pictures troop before us ! Yonder see Gibraltar, 
giant sentinel of the Mediterranean. There on long ledges 
are St. Peter's and St. Paul's, Niagara, the Pyramids, and the 
Tower of Pisa. Bracketed beyond are the great parliament 
houses of the world. Down below behold in life size the 
lesser mountains of our own land, — Washington, Monadnock, 
Mansfield, Lookout, and a thousand others. See in the dis- 
tance a million colored pictures of the Alps, the Adirondacks, 
and the Sierras. On endless shelves, this way and that, 
behold the temples and cathedrals, the castles and fortresses 
of all time. See vast armies, the armies of the ages, winding 
up the slopes, and great navies manoeuvring in the mirage- 
like distance. Here, indeed, the giant mind of Dante would 
have found new worlds to conquer ; and Homer w r ould have 
dreamed new dreams of gods and men, love and war, life and 
death, heaven and hell." 

Hamlin Garland, in one of his prose-poems, has said : 
* The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and the storm, will 
transform it into a splendor no mountain range can surpass. 



334 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, and 
gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opales- 
cent lakes of mountain water. The traveller who goes out to 
the edge and peers into the great abyss sees but one 
phase out of hundreds. If he is fortunate, it may be one of 
its most beautiful combinations of color and shadow. But 
to know it, to feel its majesty, one should camp in the 
bottom and watch the sunset and the moonrise while the 
river marches from its lair like an angry lion." 

Robert Brewster Stanton, a civil engineer whose original 
work has brought him prominently before the scientific 
world, followed Major Powell's explorations, twenty years 
later, with a surveying company of his own organization, 
— and Mr. Stanton is, indeed, the only explorer who has 
made the continuous journey the entire length of the 
Colorado River which Major Powell navigated for a thou- 
sand miles. It was in May of 1889 that Mr. Stanton and 
his men initiated this daring feat, and of one phase of the 
appearance of the canon Mr. Stanton's glowing, eloquent 
pen recorded : 

"Those terrifying, frowning walls are moving, are 
changing ! A new light is not only creeping over them, 
but is coming out from their very shadows. See those 
flattened slopes above the dark sandstone on top the 
granite ; even at this very moment they are being colored 
in gorgeous stripes of horizontal layers of yellow, brown, 
white, green, and purple. 



GRAND CANON 335 

"What means this wondrous change? Wherein lies 
this secret of the great canon ? 

" After living in it and with it for so many weeks and 
months, I lost all thought of the great chasm as being 
only a huge rock mass, carved into its many intricate forms 
by ages of erosion. It became to me what it has ever 
since remained, and what it really is, — a living, moving, 
sentient being ! 

"The Grand Canon is not a solitude. It is a living, 
moving, pulsating being, ever changing in form and color, 
pinnacles and towers springing into being out of unseen 
depths. From dark shades of brown and black, scarlet 
flames suddenly flash out and then die away into stretches 
of orange and purple. How can such a shifting, animated 
glory be called * a thing ' ? It is a being, and among its 
upper battlements, its temples, its amphitheatres, its cathe- 
dral spires, its monuments and its domes, and in the deeper 
recesses of its inner gorge its spirit, its soul, the very spirit 
of the living God himself, lives and moves and has its 
being." 

Mr. C. M. Skinner, of the " Brooklyn Eagle," impres- 
sively wrote : 

"... After the sky colors, too, have faded, you are about 
to turn away, lingering, regretting, when — again, a wonder ; 
for new colors, deep, tender, solemn, flow up along the 
painted walls, as night brims out of the deep. The bottom 
grows vague and misty, but each Walhalla is steeped in 



336 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

purple as soft as the bloom of grapes. When day is wholly 
gone and the canon has become to the eye a mere feeling or 
impression of depth and space, walk out on some lonely 
point. The slopes, thirteen miles away, are visible as gray 
walls, distinct from the black cliffs, and on the hither side the 
trees are clear against the snow. No night is absolute in 
blackness, but as we look it seems as though the canon was 
lighted from within. It is an abyss of shadow and mystery. 
There is a sadness in the canon, as in all great things of 
nature, that removes it from human experience. We have 
seen the utmost of the world's sublimity, and life is fuller 
from that hour." 

All these and many other transcriptions of its glory 
form a picture gallery which each lover of the Grand 
Canon prizes as among his choicest possessions. Thomas 
Moran, the artist, has painted many scenes from the 
canon, one of these paintings having been placed in 
the Capitol in Washington, where it is the object of 
the admiration and the wonder of the endless procession 
of visitors who throng the nation's centre. Painter and 
poet and prophet make their pilgrimages to this one 
stupendous Marvel of Nature. To the prophets and the 
poets of every century and every age it flashes its respon- 
sive message ; and the worshipper at the shrine of this 
Infinite Beauty, this sublimest Majesty, can but feel, 
with Mr. Higgins, — that poetic lover of the vast South- 
west, the lover of music and literature and art and nature, 



GRAND CANON 337 

whose beautiful life on earth closed in 1900, but whose 
charm of presence still pervades the scenes he loved and 
memorialized, — with this lofty and poetic recorder of 
nature one can but say of the Grand Canon : " Never was 
picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely 
beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that 
architecture and painting and music for a thousand years 
have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael 
Angelo and of Beethoven. 1 ' 

In retrospective glance over a very midsummer night's 
dream of the ineffable glory and beauty of wanderings 
from Pike's Peak to the Pacific there stands out to the 
mental vision one treasured possession whose loveliness ex- 
ceeds that of all scenic landscape ; which is more luminous 
and crystal clear than the luminous atmosphere of beau- 
tiful Colorado or glowing Arizona ; which is more endur- 
ing in its changelessness than even the Petrified Forests 
or the mighty precipices of the Grand Canon ; which is 
invested with all the etherial splendor of that brilliant 
young city which the Spanish conquerors knew as Pueblo 
de la Reine de los Angeles : which is as sacred in its na- 
ture as are the sacred legends of the Holy Faith of St. 
Francis. This treasured possession is that of the friend- 
ships formed during this enchanted journey ; of the gen- 
erous kindness, the bountiful hospitality ; the exquisite 

courtesy and grace constantly received from each and all 

22 



338 THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT 

with an unfailing uniformity, including those in widely vary- 
ing relations and pursuits ; those who, according to outer 
standards, are the more, or the less, fortunate in power, re- 
sources, or development, — the treasured possession of all 
this sweet and gracious friendliness is imperishable ; and 
in this priceless and precious gift, which is not only a 
treasure for the life that now is, but also for the life 
which is to come, is there crystallized all the charm of 
summer wanderings in the Land of Enchantment. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Acoma, New Mexico, 183 ; theory 
of its origin, 184 ; its antiquity, 
185 ; rivalry between it and 
Laguna, 185, 186; Charles F. 
Lummis on, 186, 187. 

Adamana, the gateway to the 
Petrified Forests of Arizona, 
270 ; origin of its name, 270 ; 
the simple life at, 274, 275. 

Adams, the Hon. Alva, 117, 118 ; 
quoted, 118, 119, 120. 

Agriculture in Colorado, 130, 131 ; 
in New Mexico, 204, 205. 

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 196 ; 
excursions from, 196 ; a "smart" 
town, 200 ; characteristics of, 
201. 

Ames, Rev. Dr. Charles Gordon, 
on civilization, 162. 

Arizona, sights of, 4, 228, 229, 
239, 257, 258, 267, 268 ; a treas- 
ure land, 9 ; visited by the 
Spaniards, 214 ; a land of magic 
and mystery, 228, 254, 255 ; its 
resources, 230, 255 ; irrigation 
in, 230, 231, 246; rainfall in, 
230, 279; its attractions for 
men of science, 231, 232 ; flora 
of, 232 ; cacti of, 233 ; grasses 
of, 234; climate of, 234, 235, 
256 ; as a health resort, 234, 
235 ; meaning of the name, 236 ; 
history of, 236 ; separation from 
New Mexico, 236, 237, 252; 



rivers of, 240, 251 ; capital of, 
243 ; towns of, 251 ; safety of 
property in, 251; citizens of, 252, 
254 ; festivity of the " Snake 
Dance," 258, 259, 260, 261 ; the 
" Painted Desert " of, 263, 264, 
265, 266 ; Petrified Forests of, 
270 ; desert of, 284, 285. 

Bear Creek Canon, 89. 

Bell, the Hon. John C, and the 

Gunnison Tunnel, 111. 
" Ben Hur," where written, 219. 
Boston woman characterized, 23 
Brooks, Bishop Phillips, on the 

superhuman, 181 ; quoted, 216. 

California, Southern, features 
of, 9. 

Campbell, Rev. Frederick, on 
Glenwood Springs, 96, 97. 

Campbell, Prof. H. W., on "dry 
farming," 129, 130. 

Canon Diablo, Arizona, 289, 292. 

Caruthers, William, on resources 
of Cripple Creek, 77. 

" Cathedral Rock," 74, 75, 81. 

Cheyenne Canon, 65, 66, 67; 
Helen Hunt Jackson on, 65. 

Cliff-dwellings of Southern Colo- 
rado, 114, 115, 116 ; bill in 
Congress for preservation of, 
114, 115; opinions concerning, 
116 ; at Flagstaff, Arizona, 286. 



342 



INDEX 



Colorado, splendors of, 14, 139; 
a second Italy, 15, 97 ; people 
of, 16 ; woman suffrage in, 25, 
26, 27, 28, 29 ; developed a de- 
mand for specialists, 33 ; em- 
ployment in, 33 ; revenue of, 
34; railways of, 37, 40, 99; 
C. B. Knox on the future of, 
39 ; Major Pike's description 
of, 63 ; has larger percentage 
of American population than 
any other Western state, 88 ; 
waterfalls of, 104 ; irrigation of, 

110, 111, 119, 126, 127, 133, 134, 
141, 145, 146, 151 ; yachting in, 

111, 112, 113; mountain climb- 
ing in, 113, 114 ; agriculture in, 
130, 131 ; ranching in, 132 ; 
*' trip round the circle " journey 
described, 134, 135, 136, 137, 
138 ; engineering feats in, 138 ; 
park systems of, 139 ; indus- 
tries of, 139, 140, 141; stone- 
quarrying in, 142, 143 ; mineral 
resources of, 143, 144, 147 ; 
population of, 147 ; progress 
of, 148 ; towns of, 148 ; north- 
ern, 149 ; coal-fields of, 150 ; 
fruit cultivation in, 151 ; labor 
in, 152, 153; forests of, 153, 
154 ; sport in, 155 ; public school 
system in, 173; literature and art 
in, 177; its future, 178, 180, 181. 

, pioneers of, 157-181 ; con- 
trasted with the Pilgrim Fathers, 
158 ; " Denver Republican " on, 
158 ; their unselfishness, 159, 

; 160, 163; environment of, 162, 
163 ; Nathan Cook Meeker, 
164-176. 

Colorado College, 85, 86, 87. 

Colorado Fuel and Iron Com- 
pany, 124, 125, 126. 



Colorado River, Arizona, 240; 
Prof. N. H. Newell on, 240, 
241, 242. 

Colorado Springs, gateway to 
Pike's Peak district, 51; cli- 
mate of, 52; excursions from, 
52; as a tourist centre, 57; 
summer and autumn in, 83; 
the town described, 84 ; fife at, 
84, 85; founded by General 
Palmer, 85; buildings of, 88; 
park system of, 89, 91. 

Commencement ceremonies in 
East and West contrasted, 86. 

Cripple Creek, towns of, 75, 76 ; 
gold resources of, 75, 76, 77; 
mines of, 76 ; character of 
miners in, 77, 78 ; favorite ex- 
cursion from, 78, 79. 

Denver, 15; metropolis of the 
West, 16; climate of, 16, 44; 
its buildings, 17, 18, 19; resi- 
dential district of, 17 ; the Cap- 
itol, 18; City Park, 18, 19; 
homes of, 19 ; telephone service 
of, 21 ; women of, and politics, 
22, 23, 25 ; election frauds in, 
28 ; smelteries of, 34 ; growth 
of population, 37 ; future of, 
38; City Arch, 40, 41, 42; 
spirit of the city, 42; enter- 
prise of, 43 ; an early opinion 
of, 43 ; a convention city, 45 ; 
Art League of, 46 ; institu- 
tions of, 46 ; education in, 46, 
47 ; churches of, 47 ; life in, 48 ; 
should replace Washington as 
capital of the Union, 48, 49 ; 
electrical supply in, 106. 

Denver and Rio Grande Rail- 
way, 99 ; scenery on, 100. 

" Denver Republican, The," 



INDEX 



343 



quoted, 147 ; on the pioneers 
of Colorado, 158. 
"Dry Farming" system, discov- 
ered by Prof. H. W. Campbell, 
129 ; Professor Olin on benefits 
of, 131; extent of, in Eastern 
Colorado, 131; success of, in 
New Mexico, 204. 

Eliot, Rev. Dr. Samuel A., 
quoted, 86, 87. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 
25, 51, 63, 94, 104, 157, 182, 
228, 268, 270, 275, 296, 311. 

Estes Park, Colorado, 155. 

" Fairy Caves " of Colorado, 98, 
100, 101. 

Fellows, Professor, surveys for 
the Gunnison Tunnel, 109, 111. 

Flagstaff, Arizona, 286 ; its an- 
tiquities, 286 ; the Lowell Ob- 
servatory at, 287, 288. 

Franciscans, mission churches of, 
191, 209, 210 ; their labors, 208, 
216, 217. 

Frost, Colonel Max, on old New 
Mexico, 187-193 ; his influence 
in New Mexico, 225 ; his career, 
226 ; Secretary of the Bureau 
of Immigration, 227. 

"Garden of the Gods," Colo- 
rado, 91, 92 ; gateway to, 91, 
92. 

Garland, Hamlin, on the Grand 
Canon, 333, 334. 

Gilbert, Prof. G. K., studies 
Meteorite Mountain of Arizona, 
290, 293, 294. 

Gleed, Charles S., on the Grand 
Canon, 333. 

Glenwood Springs, Colorado, 94 ; 



its mineral springs, 94, 95; 
bathing at, 95, 96, 97 ; Rev. 
Frederick Campbell on, 96 ; hot 
cave of, 97 ; " Fairy Caves " 
of, 98, 99, 100, 101 ; scenery at, 
99. 

Grand Canon, 4; scenic marvels 
of, 311, 312, 314, 315, 317, 319, 
321 ; Harriet Monroe on, 312, 
313 ; compared with the Eiffel 
Tower, 313 ; area of, 313, 319, 
328 ; always revealing new beau- 
ties, 316 ; atmospheric effects 
of, 316, 318, 319 ; approach to, 
318, 325, 326, 330 ; architectural 
effects of, 319, 320, 328 ; Charles 
Dudley Warner on, 322 ; vis- 
itors to, 322 ; hotels of, 323 ; 
proposed memorial to Major 
John W. Powell, 324; earliest 
discovery of, 325 ; the Hopi 
House at, 326 ; Indians of, 327 ; 
Major Powell's journal of his 
exploration of, 329, 330, 332; 
Prof. George Wharton James 
on, 331 ; eulogies of, by C. A. 
Higgins, 332, 337, by Charles 
S. Gleed, 333, by Hamlin Gar- 
land, 333, by Robert Brewster 
Stanton, 334, and by C. M. 
Skinner, 335 ; paintings of, by 
Thomas Moran, 336. 

Grand Caverns of Pike's Peak, 
68, 69 ; memorial to General 
Grant in, 69. 

Grand Lake, Colorado, 112 ; its 
yacht club, 112. 

Grand River, the, 101. 

Grant, General, memorial to, in 
Grand Caverns, 69. 

Greeley, founding of, 164, 169, 171, 
172 ; constitution of, 172 ; popu- 
lation of, 173; educational es- 



344 



INDEX 



tablishments of, 173; churches 
of, 174 ; buildings of, 175 ; life 
in, 175 ; the Meeker Memorial 
Library, 175. 

Greeley, Horace, and Colorado, 
168. 

" Greeley Tribune, The," on irri- 
gation, 127, 128 ; foundation of, 
174. 

Grenfell, Helen, record of, 27. 

Gunnison River, Colorado, 107, 
108 ; plan to divert, 108. 

Gunnison Tunnel, 108, 109, 110. 

Hammond, the Hon. Meade, and 
the Gunnison Tunnel, 111. 

Higgins, C. A., on the Grand 
Canon, 332, 337. 

Hosmer, Harriet, on travelling by 
night, 12. 

Howe, Julia Ward, quoted, 161. 

Irrigation in Colorado, 107, 110, 
111, 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 133, 
134, 141, 145, 146, 151 ; in New 
Mexico, 203, 204; in Arizona, 
230, 231, 246; in California, 
302, 307, 308. 

Jackson, Helen Hunt, quoted, 
65. 

James, Prof. George Wharton, 
on Californian missions, 210; 
on Indian life in Arizona, 261, 
262, 263; on the "Painted 
Desert," 264, 265 ; home of, at 
Pasadena, 305, 306 ; his love of 
the desert of the Southwest, 
306, 307 ; on the Grand Canon, 
330. 

Kansas City, 13. 

Kearney, General Stephen W., 



occupies Santa Fe\ 218, 219; 

memorial to, 218 ; quoted, 218. 
Kirley, the Hon. Joseph H., on 

Arizona, 251. 
Knox, C. B., on Colorado, 39, 40. 

Lacey, Representative, on the 
Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings, 115, 
116. 

Laguna, New Mexico, 185, 186. 

Las Vegas, New Mexico, 199 ; hot 
springs of, 199, 200 ; its attrac- 
tions, 202. 

Lindsay, Judge, on woman suf- 
frage, 27, 28, 29. 

Lookout Mountain, Colorado, 102, 
103 ; scenery on the ascent of, 
103. 

Los Angeles, the "boom" of, 
229, 300, 301 ; trolley system of, 
299, 303 ; lighting of, 300 ; its 
parks, 301 ; public library of, 
301 ; climate, 302 ; irrigation in, 
302, 307 ; life of, 303, 304, 310 ; 
population of, 307 ; as a centre 
for excursions, 308 ; idealism of, 
309 ; Pacific School Osteopathy 
at, 309 ; churches of, 309, 310. 

Lowell Observatory, 6, 268, 276, 
287, 288. 

Lowell, Professor Percival, 287. 

Manitou, 67, 68, 104; mineral 
springs of, 67. 

Manitou Park, 64, 65. 

Maricopa County, 243, 244. 

Mars, photographs of, taken at 
Lowell Observatory, 287, 288, 
289. 

Mead, Prof. Elwood, on irriga- 
tion, 144, 145. 

Meeker family, 164, 165. 

Meeker, the Hon. Nathan Cook, 
165; his career, 165, 166; his 
visit to the West, 167 ; Horace 



INDEX 



345 



Greeley encourages him to es- 
tablish a colony in Colorado, 
168 ; founds the town of Gree- 
ley, 169 ; his work among the 
Indians, 169, 170 ; massacred, 
170. 

Meeker, town of, 170, 171. 

Mendoza, expeditions organized 
by, 213, 236. 

Meredith, Ellis, 79; her literary 
work, 80 ; her ode to the 
"Short Line," 81. 

" Mesa, the Enchanted," ascent 
of, 184 ; described, 184. 

Mesa Verde, cliff-dwellings of, 
115, 116 ; Representative Lacey 
on, 115, 116. 

Meteorite Mountain, Arizona, 
290; theory of origin, 290, 291, 
293, 295 ; discovery of diamonds 
in, 290 ; description of, 291, 292 ; 
experiments of Dr. Foote re- 
lating to, 295. 

Monroe, Harriet, on the " Painted 
Desert," 263 ; quoted, 311 ; on 
the Grand Canon, 312, 313. 

Montezuma Well, Arizona, 257. 

Monument Park, 91. 

Monument Valley, 91. 

Moran, Thomas, paintings by, of 
the Grand Canon, 336. 

Mount Massive, ascent of, 113, 
114. 

Mountain climbing in Colorado, 
113, 114. 

Muir, John, discovers a new Pet- 
rified Forest of Arizona, 277. 

Munk, Dr. Joseph A. ,on the cacti 
of Arizona, 232, 233 ; on Arizona 
as a health resort, 234, 235. 

Murphy, the Hon. N. O., opinions 
on the union of Arizona and 
New Mexico, 253, 254. 



New Mexico, features of, 8 ; cli- 
mate of, 13 ; a land of surprises, 
182 ; its mixed population, 182 ; 
scenery of, 183 ; ruins of, 183 ; 
its ancient civilization, 187-193 ; 
Franciscan mission churches of, 
191; archaeology of, 193; its 
progress in modern ideas, 194 ; 
French expedition to, 195 ; com- 
pared with Algiers, 195 ; hotels 
in, 195 ; resources of, 196, 197, 
198; irrigation in, 203, 204; 
railroads of, 203 ; opportunities 
in, 204 ; fruit growing in, 205 ; 
mineral wealth of, 205 ; under 
Spanish rule, 214 ; records of, 
217 ; Historical Association of, 
220. 

Newberry, Dr., on Arizona, 267. 

Newell, Prof. N. H., on the Colo- 
rado River, 240, 241, 242. 

Newspapers of the Southwest, 122 ; 
" Greeley Tribune "quoted, 127; 
" Denver Republican " quoted, 
147,158; "The New Mexican," 
225; "The Eagle" of Santa 
Fe, 227. 

Night, charm of travelling by, 11, 
12 ; at Pike's Peak, 55, 56. 

Nizza, Friar Marcos de, mission- 
ary labors of, 208; expedition 
of, 213. 



Onate, Juan de, founds Santa Fe, 
214. 

" Painted Desert," The, of Ari- 
zona, 261-266; Prof. George 
Wharton James on, 262, 264; 
Harriet Monroe on, 263. 

Pajarito Park, New Mexico, 187. 

Palmer, General William J., 
founds Colorado Springs, 85 ; 



346 



INDEX 



benefactor of the state, 89, 90, 
93 ; residence of, 90. 

Pasadena, California, 304 ; home 
of Prof. George Wharton James 
at, 305, 306. 

" Pathfinders and Pioneers," Gov- 
ernor Alva Adams on, 118, 119, 
120. 

Patterson, Senator, career of, 31, 
32. 

Petrified Forests, the, of Arizona, 
270; a visit to, 271, 278, 279; 
atmospheric effects in, 272, 273, 
283 ; towns in neighborhood of, 
276 ; metropolis of, 277 ; dis- 
covery by John Muir, 277 ; dif- 
ficulties of visiting, 279 ; three 
in number, 279 ; area of, 279 ; 
antiquities of, 281, 282; preser- 
vation of, insured by the Gov- 
ernment, 282; the marvel of 
the geologist, 283; an arid 
region, 284. 

Phillips, Stephen, quoted, 15. 

Phoenix, capital of Arizona, 243 ; 
a tourist centre, 243; attrac- 
tions of, 245 ; winter in, 245 ; 
school system of, 252. 

Pike, Major (afterwards General) 
Zebulon Montgomery, discov- 
ery by, 59 ; his ascent of Pike's 
Peak, 60; his career, 61, 62; 
diary of, 62, 63. 

Pike's Peak, region of, 4; gate- 
way of, 51 ; winter at, 51 ; the 
mountain described, 52, 53, 54 ; 
sunsets at, 54, 55 ; at night, 55, 
56 ; cogwheel railway of, 56 ; as- 
cent of, 57, 58 ; its souvenir daily 
paper, 57 ; summit of, 58 ; dis- 
covery of, 59 ; centenary of 
discovery celebrated, 64 ; favor- 
ite excursion in vicinity of, 64. 



Pilgrim Fathers, contrasted with 
the Colorado pioneers, 158. 

" Point of Rocks," Arizona, 238. 

Powell, Major John W., explores 
the Grand Canon, 324, 325; 
journal of his expedition, 329, 
330. 

Prescott, in Arizona, 237 ; mines 
of, 237 ; the " Point of Rocks " 
near, 238 ; surrounding coun- 
try, 238. 

Prince, the Hon. L. Bradford, on 
New Mexico, 218. 

Pueblo, 116, 117 ; home of Gov- 
ernor Alva Adams in, 117; its 
amenities, 121, 123; club-house 
of, 121 ; climate of, 122 ; library 
of, 122 ; plant of the Colorado 
Fuel and Iron Company at, 
124, 125, 126. 

Ranching in Colorado, 132. 
Raton, New Mexico, 198. 
Routt County, mineral wealth of, 
39. 

Salpointe, Most Rev. Dr. J. B., 
archbishop of New Mexico, 210. 

Salt River Valley, Arizona, 230, 
244, 247 ; its mammoth dam, 
231; fruit-rearing in, 247. 

Salton Sea, the, 242. 

Salton Sink, the, 242, 243. 

San Xavier, mission church of, 
215, 217. 

Santa Fe, consecrated by holy 
memories, 207 ; founded by 
Onate, 209, 214; centre of 
archdiocese, 210; church of 
San Miguel, 209, 211 ; visit 
of Diego de Vargas to, 211 ; 
buildings of, 212; inhabitants 
of, 212; oldest town in the 



INDEX 



347 



United States, 214; occupied 
by General Stephen W. Kear- 
ney, 218 ; governed by General 
Lew. Wallace, 219 ; " Ben Hur " 
written at, 219 ; old palace of, 
220 ; society in, 220, 221 ; pre- 
cious stones in vicinity of, 
221 ; chapel of San Rosario, 221, 
222 ; history of, 223 ; buildings 
of, 223. 

Santa Monica, California, 303. 

Seeman Tunnel, the, 35 ; claims 
reached by, 36. 

" Short Line " trip, Colorado, 4, 
7, 70, 71, 72; homes along the 
railway, 74; hand-car journey 
on, 79, 80, 81 ; Ellis Meredith's 
ode to, 81. 

Skinner, G. M., on the Grand 
Canon, 335, 336. 

" Snake Dance, The," in Arizona, 
258, 259, 260, 261. 

Southwest, scenic attractions of, 
4-14 ; characteristics of life in, 
10; travelling facilities of, 11, 
12 ; gateway of, 13. 

Stanton, Robert Brewster, on the 
Grand Canon, 334, 335. 

Stone, Lucy, and the emancipa- 
tion of women, 24. 

St. Peter's Dome, railway up, 4 ; 
excursion to, 64; ascent of, 71, 
73 ; view from, 72, 74. 

Sugar, cultivation of, in Colorado, 
139, 140, 141, 150. 

Teller, the Hon. Henry M., 
career of, 30. 

'* Temple Drive," a favorite ex- 
cursion in Pike's Peak region, 
64. 



Tennyson, Lord, quoted, 3. 
Thayer, Mrs. Emma Homan, 

102 ; her " Wild Flowers in 

Colorado," 102. 
Tonto Basin, mammoth dam at, 

246, 248, 249, 250 ; entailed the 

destruction of the town of 

Roosevelt, 247, 250. 

Vaca, Alvar Numez de, expedi- 
tion of, 213. 

Vargas, Diego de, visits Santa 
Fe, 211, 221; his vow to the 
Virgin Mary, 222. 

Wallace, General Lew., gover- 
nor of New Mexico, 219 ; writes 
" Ben Hur " at Santa Fe, 219. 

Walsh, Thomas F., on Colorado 
and Philippine interests, 140, 
141, 142. 

Warner, Charles Dudley, on the 
Grand Canon, 322. 

Washington, may give place to 
Denver as the capital of the 
Union, 49. 

Water-power, in Colorado, and 
electricity, 104, 105, 106, 107. 

Webster, Daniel, on the worth- 
lessness of the West, 179. 

Whitman, Walt, quotation from, 
158. 

Woman suffrage, 23, 24, 25 ; in 
Colorado, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; 
Judge Lindsay on, 27, 28, 29. 

Yachting in Colorado, 111, 112, 
113. 

Zumacacori, mission church of, 
215. 



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